Question

I have the following expression:

"<p>What ?</p>\n<pre>Starting Mini</pre>"

When I perform a split as follows:

   var split = content
      .Split(new[] { "<pre>", "</pre>" }, StringSplitOptions.None);

Then it gives me three entries:

"<p>What ?</p>\n"
"Starting Mini"
""

Why does it give an empty line as the third entry and how can I avoid this?

Answer 1

The “why” is simply: the input (if you don’t remove empty entries) will always “split” at any occurrence of the separator(s), so if the separator(s) appear n times in the string, then the array will be n+1 long. In particular, this essentially lets you know where they occurred in the original string (although when using multiple separators, it doesn’t let you know which appeared where).

For example, with a simple example (csv without any escaping etc):

string[] arr = input.Split(','); // even if something like "a,b,c,d,"
// which allows...
int numberOfCommas = arr.Length - 1;
string original = string.Join(",", arr);

The fix is, as already mentioned, to use RemoveEmptyEntries.