Question

I am trying to break a large string of text into several smaller strings of text and define each smaller text strings max length to be different. for example:

"The quick brown fox jumped over the red fence.
       The blue dog dug under the fence."

I would like to have code that can split this into smaller lines and have the first line have a max of 5 characters, the second line have a max of 11, and rest have a max of 20, resulting in this:

Line 1: The 
Line 2: quick brown
Line 3: fox jumped over the 
Line 4: red fence.
Line 5:        The blue dog 
Line 6: dug under the fence.

All this in C# or MSSQL, is it possible?

Answer 1

public List<String> SplitString(String text, int [] lengths)
{
   List<String> output = new List<String>();

   List<String> words = Split(text);

   int i = 0;
   int lineNum = 0;
   string s = string.empty;
   while(i<words.Length)
   {
       if(s.Length+words[i].Length <lengths[lineNum])
       {
            s+=words[i];
            i++;
            if(lineNum<lengths.Length-1)
                 lineNum++;
       }
       else
       {
          output.Add(s);
          s=String.Empty;
       }

   }

    s.Remove(S.length-1,1);// deletes last extra space.

    return output;
}


   public static List<string> Split(string text)
    {
        List<string> result = new List<string>();
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

        foreach (var letter in text)
        {
            if (letter != ' ' && letter != '\t' && letter != '\n')
            {
                sb.Append(letter);
            }
            else
            {
                if (sb.Length > 0)
                {

                    result.Add(sb.ToString());
                }

                result.Add(letter.ToString());
                sb = new StringBuilder();
            }
        }

        return result;
    }

This is untested/compiled code, but you should get the idea.

I also think you should use a StringBuilder instead, but I didn’t remember how to use it.