Question

I have the following main string which contains link Name and link URL. The name and url is combined with #;. I want to get the string of each link (name and url i.e. My web#?http://www.google.com), see example below

string teststring = "My web#;http://www.google.com My Web2#;http://www.bing.se Handbooks#;http://www.books.se/";

and I want to get three different strings using any string function:

• My web#?http://www.google.com
• My Web2#?http://www.bing.se
• Handbooks#?http://www.books.de

Answer 1

So this looks like you want to split on the space after a #;, instead of splitting at #; itself. C# provides arbitrary length lookbehinds, which makes that quite easy. In fact, you should probably do the replacement of #; with #? first:

string teststring = "My web#;http://www.google.com My Web2#;http://www.bing.se Handbooks#;http://www.books.se/";
teststring = Regex.Replace(teststring, @"#;", "#?");
string[] substrings = Regex.Split(teststring, @"(?<=#\?\S*)\s+");

That’s it:

foreach(var s in substrings)
    Console.WriteLine(s);

Output:
My web#?http://www.google.com
My Web2#?http://www.bing.se
Handbooks#?http://www.books.se/

If you are worried that your input might already contain other #? that you don’t want to split on, you can of course do the splitting first (using #; in the pattern) and then loop over substrings and do the replacement call inside the loop.