Question

I’m trying to parse a file that looks like this:

|| Column Header A || Column Header B || Column Header C ||CRLF
| Data A | Data B | Data C |CRLF
| Data A | Data B | Data C |CRLF

(“CRLF” represents a line break)

I had code to parse this fine:

I first parse the file into an array of lines:

 string[] lines = fileString.Split(Environment.NewLine.ToCharArray(), StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

Then, I parse each row to an array of column data values,

First, I parse to get the header using:

  string Delimiter = "||";
  string[] columns = line.Split(new string[] { Delimiter }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

Then parse the rest of the rows using

    string Delimiter = "|";
  string[] columns = line.Split(new string[] { Delimiter }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

This worked perfectly until I found a record that had a CRLF inside of a field so my parsing broke up.

Can anyone think of a good way to parse this data below, and handles CRLF correctly? Here is an example:

|| Column Header A || Column Header B || Column Header C ||CRLF
| Data A | Data B | Data C |CRLF
| Data A | Data B CRLF Continued B | Data C |CRLF

The issue is that when I do the initial parsing to get the array of lines, I get 4 lines here instead of 3 (because the last line shows up as two entries in that array.)

Answer 1

Not exactly elegant, but this brute-force solution is the first to come to mind. Split, and then combine if short:

var lines = content.Split(...);
string header[] = lines[0].Split(...);
int numberOfColumns = header.Length;

var parsedLines = new List<string[]>();
for (int i = 1; i < lines.Length; i++) {
   var line = lines[i];

   while ((fields = line.Split(...)).Length < numberOfColumns) {
     // combine with next, and increment i
     line += lines[++i];
   }

   parsedLines.Add(fields);
}