Question

I’m building a custom parser that should read a delimited list of data, and store the results in a class. My problem is, the program that generates the data doesn’t always include all the delimiters.

For example, if the last 3 properties have no value, it will skip the last 3 delimiters.

I was using something like this until I noticed this quirk:

var data = message.Split(delimiter);

if (data.Length < 5)
    throw new Exception("Invalid message");

Id = data[0];
Property1 = data[1];
Property2 = data[2];
Property3 = data[3];
Property4 = data[4];

Of course, if the delimited string contains less than 5 elements, that creates a problem.

What’s the best way to parse a potentially bad delimited string into a class?

I don’t want to use an if statement for each property because some delimited strings contain over 50 properties.

I thought of creating an array of all the properties, and running a for-each loop on the data array, but I’m not sure the performance implications of this and would like to see if there’s a better way first.

Answer 1

Assuming that the properties are nullable

Property1 = data.Length > 1 ? data[1] : null;
Property2 = data.Length > 2 ? data[2] : null;
Property3 = data.Length > 3 ? data[3] : null;
Property4 = data.Length > 4 ? data[4] : null;

Instead of null you can use any default value that makes sense for the properties.

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EDIT:

var dataEx = new string[expectedLength];
data.CopyTo(dataEx, 0);

Property1 = dataEx[1];
Property2 = dataEx[2];
Property3 = dataEx[3];
Property4 = dataEx[4];