Question

I want to use the Split function on a string but keep the delimiting sequence as the first characters in each element of the string array. I am using this function to split HTML on every instance of a URL so I can run regex patterns on the URLs on a website. Is there any overloads of the split function to do this? or do I have to write my own function?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There is no built-in method for doing that. If you are splitting on a single pattern though, this can be coded out with the following

public IEnumerable<string> SplitAndKeepPrefix(this string source, string delimeter) {   return SplitAndKeepPrefix(source, delimeter, StringSplitOptions.None); }  public IEnumerable<string> SplitAndKeepPrefix(this string source, string delimeter, StringSplitOptions options ) {   var split = source.Split(delimeter, options);   return split.Take(1).Concat(split.Skip(1).Select(x => delimeter + x)); }  string result = htmlStr.SplitAndKeepPrefix('<a'); 

EDIT

Updated to not prefix every string 🙂