Question

I need to parse some information from lines of texts that follow a certain formatting layout. This is an example of how the text file would look:

A. This is option a              C. This is option c
B. This is option b              D. This is option d

At the end of the day, all I want is that after parsing the above two lines, I would then have on my C# code:

string OptionA = "This is option a";
string OptionB = "This is option b";
string OptionC = "This is option c";
string OptionD = "This is option d";

The space between A. and C. (or B. and D.) could either be a tab (\t) or a random number of white spaces. When stepping through the code and the line is read, this is how it looks:

"A.\tThis is option a\tC. This is option c"

Or it may look like this

"A.\tThis is option a        C. This is option c"

I probably need some help splitting this line based on “\t” or a number of white spaces preceeding “C.” as in the case of the above example.

Any inputs would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The following regex should do it,

@"^([A-Z])[.](.+[^\s])\s+([A-Z])[.](.+)$"

Where for each line

• Groups[0] is the whole line
• Groups[1] is the first letter (e.g. A)
• Groups[2] is the first option (e.g. This is option a)
• Groups[3] is the second letter (e.g. C)
• Groups[4] is the second option(e.g. This is option c)