Question

I am relitively new to coding c# for web applications, but have some knowledge in c#.

I am trying to read a text file (example below) and produce a webpage with format based on the characters used to seperate each line.

I’m sure there is a very simple way to do this, but this is what I have come up with. It works for my current intended purpose, but looks horrible and complicated.

The file I’m reading looks as follows:

^This ^is ^the ^home ^file.|*This is a ^bullet point.|*^This is another one.|This isn't a bullet point.

The code I have to read this and display it looks like this:

@{int bulletNum = 0;}
@foreach (string homeLine in homeData)
{
    foreach (string homeItem in homeLine.Split('|'))
    {
        if (homeItem.First()=='*')
        {
            bulletNum++;
            <ol class="round">
                <li class="num@(bulletNum)">
                    @foreach (string homeElementFirst in homeItem.Split(' '))
                    {
                        string homeElementSecond = homeElementFirst.TrimStart('*');
                        if (homeElementSecond.First() == '^')
                        {
                            <b>@homeElementSecond.TrimStart('^')</b>
                        }
                        else
                        {
                            @homeElementSecond <text> </text>
                        }
                    }
                </li>
            </ol>
        }
        else
        {
            foreach (string homeElement in homeItem.Split(' '))
            {
                if (homeElement.First() == '^')
                {
                    <b>@homeElement.TrimStart('^')</b>
                }
                else
                {
                    @homeElement <text> </text>
                }
            }
        }
        <br />
    }
}

Please excuse my terrible variable names.

Can anyone help tidy this up for me? Thanks.

Answer 1

It looks like you’re trying to implement a custom markup language, albeit a simple one. I would recommend that you use an existing library for this sort of thing. Check out Textile, which does something similar. There’s a C# port of Textile available.