Question

I have a list of about 1500 strings from an external database and over time, as a group of business users managed them, they came to have recurring substrings which have semantic value.

I’m building a front-end and would like to present the user with filtering drop down list of those substrings.

For example if I have the input strings:

• US foo
• US bar (Inactive)
• UK bat
• UK baz (Inactive)
• AU womp
• AU rat

I want to get back:

• US
• UK
• AU
• Inactive

My first thoughts are to have a threshold parameter and a list of delimeters. For the above I might say threshold=.3 and delimiters are space, (, and ).

Then do a string.split on using the delimiters and use a datastructure like a set that that counts repeated items (?)…

I am not trying to have someone do my work for me here – advice on the approach to take from someone who has done this would be great.

Answer 1

This problem is a good candidate for a Linq approach:

var words = from s in listOfStrings
            from word in s.Split(new[] { ' ', '(', ')' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
            group word by word;
var dic = words.ToDictionary(g => g.Key, g => g.Count());