Question

I have read in some CSV values, line by line, that have the following format:

30: "NY", 41: "JOHN S.", 36: "HAMPTON", 42: "123 Road Street, NY", 68: "Y"

I need to break this down to something like the following in order to parse these items further:

30: "NY"

41: "JOHN S."

36: "HAMPTON"

42: "123 Road Street, NY" (note the comma)

...

I’m using the FileHelper library, but it seems to like reading things in line-by-line, despite me wanting it split by it’s delimited , commas.

I have the record class:

[DelimitedRecord(",")]
class BoxRecord
{
    public String record;
}

And I retrieve what I hoped would be several objects in an array via the following, but it just returns me the original line:

DelimitedFileEngine engine = new DelimitedFileEngine(typeof(BoxRecord));
BoxRecord[] boxes = (BoxRecord[])engine.ReadString(boxLine);

What I want boxes[].record to contain:

30: "NY"

41: "JOHN S."

36: "HAMPTON"

42: "123 Road Street, NY"

...

What it actually contains:

30: "NY", 41: "JOHN S.", 36: "HAMPTON", 42: "123 Road Street, NY", 68: "Y"

Answer 1

After getting the line, you can break the line based on below linq to get what you want:

string input = "30: \"NY\", 41: \"JOHN S.\", " +
   "36: \"HAMPTON\", 42: \"123 Road Street, NY\", 68: \"Y\"";

var tempList = input.Split('\"').ToList();

var result = Enumerable.Range(0, tempList.Count/2)
    .Select(i => string.Join(": "
        , tempList[2*i].Split(new[] { ',', ':' })
           .Single(ss => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(ss))

        , tempList[2*i + 1]));

---

Update: Seem it’s interesting for me, this code is to handle the case as your comment:

var tempList1 = input.Split(':').ToList();

var tempList2 = tempList1.SelectMany((s, index) =>
 {
     if (index == 0 || index == tempList1.Count - 1)
         return new List<string>() { s };

     var subList = s.Split(',');
     return new List<string>
           { 
                string.Concat(subList.Take(subList.Length - 1)),
                subList.Last()
           };
 }).ToList();

var result = Enumerable.Range(0, tempList2.Count / 2)
         .Select(i => string.Join(": ", tempList2[2 * i], tempList2[2 * i + 1]));