Question

Say we have a string, called source. It contains “New York City – 12A – 1234B”

Here are the rules:

a. We know that the closest two numbers to the beginning of the string should kept, along with the following character and placed into a separate string, called results;

b. We are not certain if this following character will be a number or a letter

c. The formatting of the string itself varies – it could be “NY 12A 1234B”

d. We could care less about anything else!

Now I in my infinite wisdom have crafted this monstrosity. It works but please tell me there is a better way to do this or at best a cleaner, more performance conscious way of doing it.

class Program
    {
        public static int i = 0;
        public static int q = 0;
        public static int x = 0;
        public static string source = "New York City - 12A - 1234B";
        public static string results = "";
        public static char[] from_source_char;
        public static List<string> from_source_list = new List<string>();

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            from_source_char = source.ToCharArray();
            foreach (char unit in from_source_char)
            {
                from_source_list.Add(unit.ToString());
            }


            Console.WriteLine("Doing while " + i.ToString() + " < " + (from_source_list.Count() - 1).ToString());
            while (i < from_source_list.Count() - 1)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("i is at " + i.ToString());
                Console.WriteLine("Examining " + from_source_list[i].ToString());

                try
                {
                    q = Convert.ToInt32(from_source_list[i]);
                    results += from_source_list[i].ToString();
                    Console.WriteLine("Found part 1!");
                    x++;
                }
                catch
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Disregarding " + from_source_list[i].ToString());
                    // do nothing
                }

                if (x == 2)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Found final part! " + from_source_char[i+1].ToString());
                    results += from_source_char[i+1].ToString();
                    break;
                }

                i++;

            }

            Console.WriteLine("Result is " + results.ToString());
            Thread.Sleep(999999);
        }
    }

Answer 1

You could use a Regex with this pattern: @"^.*?(?<numbers>\d{2}\w).*$".

Example:

var f = @"^.*?(?<numbers>\d{2}\w).*$";
var match = Regex.Match("NY 12A 1234B", f);
var result = match.Groups["numbers"].Value;