Question

Newbie still learning, been trying to search and hack code together for hours now, I think there’s something fundamental I’m not getting!

Okay so,I have a string (taken from a text file) – “user1,password,1,0;user2,password,0,0;user3,password,0,0;user4,password,0,0”

I want to split the string into a multidimensional array(I think)

userAccount[1]= 
    accountDetails[userName]=user1
    accountDetails[password]=password
    accountDetails[adminRights]=1
    accountDetails[loginAttempts]=0
userAccount[2]=
    accountDetails[userName]=user2
...So on and so on

I’d like to use an enum for accountDetails for readability aswell but I can get that working after.

What is the best way of creating this multidimensional array from the string?

Lots thanks in advance,
Ross

Answer 1

As others suggested, creating a class for the data would be a better choice than a multidimensional “array”.

The class could look like this:

class UserAccount
{
    public string UserName { get; set; }
    public string Password { get; set; }
    public bool HasAdminRights { get; set; }
    public int LoginAttempts { get; set; }
}

And you could then parse the string using string.Split() first for ; and then in each part for ,. Using LINQ it could look like this:

string line = …;

var users = (from userString in line.Split(';')
             select userString.Split(',') into parts
             select new UserAccount
             {
                UserName = parts[0],
                Password = parts[1],
                HasAdminRights = int.Parse(parts[2]) != 0,
                LoginAttempts = int.Parse(parts[3])
             }).ToArray();