Question

I have a file I am bringing into a RTB.

Let’s say it looks something like this:

// Some Title
// Some Author
// Created on
// Created by
//

Format:
 "Text Length" : 500 lines
 "Page Length" : 20 pages

Component: 123456
 "Name" : Little Red Riding Hood
 "Body Length" : 13515 lines
 ........etc // can have any number of lines under 'Component: 123456'

Component: abcd
 "Name" : Some other Text
 "Body Length" : 12 lines
 ........etc // can have any number of lines under 'Component: abcd'



... etc, etc  // This can occur thousands of times as this file has an unset length.

Now what I would like to do is store everything from Component: 123456 until it reaches the next Component (which happens to be abcd) and store everything into the List<string> position 0. The next one will be in position 1.. and so on until the entire file is read.

Does anyone know how to do this? — I don’t necessarily need to use List<string>

Answer 1

Well, you could do something like:

// I'm assuming you're using .NET 4
var lines = File.ReadLines(filename);

var components = new List<string>();
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
foreach (var line in lines)
{
    if (line.StartsWith("Component: "))
    {
        components.Add(builder.ToString());
        builder = new StringBuilder();
    }        
    builder.Append(line);
    builder.Append("\r\n");
}

// Get the trailing component
components.Add(builder.ToString());

// Get rid of the first non-component part
components.RemoveAt(0);

(It’s more efficient to ignore the bits before the first component, but it makes the code more complicated.)