Question

I’m pretty sure it has been asked before, but I could not find anything good.
I’m trying to parse a log but having troubles with it.

At first it looked pretty easy because the log is build like this:

thing,thing,thing,thing

so I string split it on the ,

however in the value itself it is possible that a , appears, and this is where I did not know what to do anymore.

How would I successfully parse this kind of log?

Edit~~
here is an log example:

1326139200953,info,,0,"str value which may contain,  ",,,0
1326139201109,info,,0,"str value which may contain,  ",,,0
1326139201265,info,,0,"str value which may contain,  ",,,0
1326139201999,start,,0,,,,0
1326139368296,new,F:\Dir\Dir\file.txt,1536,,0,,0
``

Answer 1

If your log file doesn’t have field encapsulators, the fields have variable width, and the separator/delimiter can also appear in a field, then it’s likely you can’t program something that will work in all cases.

Can you supply an example of your log file data? It may be possible to match the parts you need with a regex.

Unfortunately I think your question is not answerable in its current state, please provide more info.

Edit: Thanks for updating the question, you do have field encapsulators (double quotes). This will make it easier!

I think there are many ways to do this. Personally i think i would carry on splitting on commas, but then loop over the resulting array, checking if the first character of any value is a double quote. If it is, then you need to join it to the array item after it. If the last character of the joined array item isn’t a double quote, you need to continue joining until you’ve closed your opening double quote.

There’s certainly a better way so you may wish to wait for another solution.

Edit 2: Give this a go and let me know how you get on:

string myRegex = @"(?<=^(?:[^""]*""[^""]*"")*[^""]*),";
string[] outputArray = Regex.Split(myStr, myRegex);