Question

I have a database column, delimited by colons, describing a category hierarchy like so:

ID | Category

100 | Domestic:Trees:Fruit:Apples

I would like to extract only the third segment of the hierarchy “Fruit” from the text. How can I use Linq Regex or Linq Filtering to extract just that segment? Is it a good idea to extract information this way for every time a user selects a category?

Answer 1

Your question makes it sound like you want a linq answer only – so if you wanted to use linq, you could do this…

string s = "Domestic:Trees:Fruit:Apples".Split(':')
           .Select((item, index) => new {item, index})
           .Where(i => i.index == 2)
           .Select(i => i.item);

Doing it in linq vs just splitting the string and taking the one you need isn’t going to make your code any easier to read – so you may want to just consider going with just a straight split as Andrew suggested.