Question

I have a string and I want to check if it represents a proper namespace, eg. System.IO is ok, but System.Lol is not.

I guess some reflection should be used, but I can’t figure this out.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Your question “How to check if string is a namespace” is only valid when you consider where you are checking for namespaces.

Namespaces are prefixes to class names, and classes are scoped to an assembly. To check whether a namespace exists, you need to decide which assemblies you are prepared to look through to find the existence of the namespace.

Once you have decided which assemblies you are prepared to look through, you can iterate through them for the existence of a particular namespace like so:

public bool NamespaceExists(IEnumerable<Assembly> assemblies, string ns)
{
    foreach(Assembly assembly in assemblies)
    {
        if(assembly.GetTypes().Any(type => type.Namespace == ns))
            return true;
    }

    return false;
}