Question

I have a dropdownlist that has the value of two columns in it… One column is a number ranging from 5 characters long to 8 characters long then a space then the ‘|’ character and another space, followed by a Description for the set of numbers.

An example:

12345678 | Description of Product 

In order to pull the items for the dropdownlist into my database I need a to utilize a substring to pull the sequence of numbers out only.

Is it possible to write a substring to pull multiple character lengths? (Sometimes it may be 6 numbers, sometimes 5 numbers, sometimes 8, it would depend on what the user selected from the dropdownlist.)

Answer 1

Use a regular expression for this.

Assuming the number is at the start of the string, you can use the following:

^[0-9]+

Usage:

var theNumbers = RegEx.Match(myDropdownValue, "^[0-9]+").Value;

You could also use string.Split to get the parts separated by | if you know the first part is what you need and will always be numeric:

var theNumbers = myDropdownValue.Split("| ".ToCharArray(), 
                                       StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)[0];

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Either of these approaches will result in a string. You can use int.Parse on the result in order to get an integer from it.