Question

I have a text file looks like:

AssembleComponent Motor = new AssembleComponent;
AssembleComponent Shaft = new AssembleComponent;
......

Motor.cost = 100;
Motor.quantity = 100;
Shaft.cost = 10;
Shaft.quantity = 100;
......

I wish to execute these code lines in C#, so that I will have these Motor.cost, Motor.quantity, Shaft.cost, Shaft.quantity variables stored in the memory for later calculation.

What can I do to achieve this?

Answer 1

Store it as XML instead

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Components>
    <Component name="Motor" cost="100" quantity="100" />
    <Component name="Shaft" cost="10" quantity="100" />
</Components>

Assuming that you have this definition

public class AssembleComponent
{
    public decimal Cost { get; set; }
    public int Quantity { get; set; }
}

Load it like this

var components = new Dictionary<string, AssembleComponent>();
XDocument doc = XDocument.Load(@"C:\Users\Oli\Desktop\components.xml");
foreach (XElement el in doc.Root.Descendants()) {
    string name = el.Attribute("name").Value;
    decimal cost = Decimal.Parse(el.Attribute("cost").Value);
    int quantity = Int32.Parse(el.Attribute("quantity").Value);
    components.Add(name, new AssembleComponent{ 
                             Cost = cost, Quantity = quantity
                         });
}

---

You can then access the components like this

AssembleComponent motor = components["Motor"];
AssembleComponent shaft = components["Shaft"];

Note: Creating the variable names dynamically by calling the compiler at runtime is not very useful since you need to know them at compile-time (or design-time if you prefer) to do something useful with them. Therefore, I added the components to a dictionary. This is a good way of creating “variables” dynamically.