Question

I have a need of checking whether there is the date in the string or not.

FUTIDX 26FEB2009 NIFTY 0 -- There is date in the string.

FUTIDX MINIFTY 30 Jul 2009 -- There is date in the string.

FUTSTK ONGC 27 Mar 2008 -- There is date in the string.

How can I do that ?

Answer 1

What @danish is telling you is that you will need to try out RegEx (or regular expressions). There are tons of sites out there – MSDN; Practical Parsing; Learn Regular Expressions – just to name a few.

If you are expecting your date in only 2 specific formats, then we only have 2 patterns that we would need to match. Your example data:

FUTIDX 26FEB2009 NIFTY 0 — There is date in the string.

FUTIDX MINIFTY 30 Jul 2009 — There is date in the string.

FUTSTK ONGC 27 Mar 2008 — There is date in the string.

provides us with 2 patterns:

1. ddMMMyyyy
2. dd Mmm yyyy

The example below will only look for a month in the short form. This should be enough to help you get going.

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace regexmonthtest
{
    class MainClass
    {

            // in your class, define 2 string patterns
        static string pattern = @"(jan|feb|mar|apr|may|jun|jul|aug|sep|oct|nov|dec)";

        public static void Main (string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine (HasDate("FUTIDX 26FEB2009 NIFTY 0"));
            Console.WriteLine (HasDate("FUTSTK MINIFTY 30 Jul 2009"));
            Console.WriteLine (HasDate("FUTIDX 26api1234 NIFTY 0"));
        }


        public static bool HasDate (string textIn)
        {
            textIn = textIn.ToLower();
            Console.Write(textIn + '\t');

            return (Regex.Match(textIn, pattern).Success);
        }
    }
}

output:

futidx 26feb2009 nifty 0 True
futstk minifty 30 jul 2009 True
futidx 26api1234 nifty 0 False