Question

Is there any method that I can use that returns a fixed length array after spliting a string with some delimiter and fill the rest with a default string.
Eg.

string fullName = "Jhon Doe";
string[] names = fullName.SpecialSplit(some parameters); //This should always return string array of length 3 with the second elememnt set to empty if there is no middle name.

Answer 1

You should read over Jon Skeet’s Writing the perfect question. It will be beneficial to you in the future when posting questions of StackOverflow.

There is no method in C# to do what you are asking, but you can easily write an extension method to do what I think you are asking.

here is a quick example:

public static class AbreviatorExtention
    {

        public static string[] GetInitials(this String str, char splitChar)
        {
            string[] initialArray = new string[3];
            var nameArray = str.Split(new char[] { splitChar },
                            StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

            if (nameArray.Length == 2)
            {
                var charArrayFirstName = nameArray[0].ToCharArray();
                var charArrayLastName = nameArray[1].ToCharArray();

                initialArray[0] = charArrayFirstName[0].ToString().ToUpper();
                initialArray[1] = string.Empty;
                initialArray[2] = charArrayLastName[0].ToString().ToUpper();
            }
            else
            {
                for (int i = 0; i < nameArray.Length; i++)
                {
                    initialArray[i] = (nameArray[i].ToCharArray())[1]
                                      .ToString().ToUpper();
                }
            }


            return initialArray;
        }
    }

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string FullName = "john doe";

            //Extension method in use
            string[] names = FullName.GetInitials(' ');

            foreach (var item in names)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(item); 
            }

            Console.ReadLine();
        }
    }

Output:

J

D