Question

We tried a few solutions now that try and use XML parsers. All fail because the strings are not always 100% valid XML. Here’s our problem.

We have strings that look like this:

var a = "this is a testxxx of my data yxxx and of these xxx parts yxxx";
var b = "hello testxxx world yxxx ";

"this is a testxxx3yxxx and of these xxx1yxxx";
"hello testxxx1yxxx ";

The key here is that we want to do something to the data between xxx and yxxx. In the example above I would need a function that counts words and replaces the strings with a word count.

Is there a way we can process the string a and apply a function to change the data that’s between the xxx and yxxx? Any function right now as we’re just trying to get an idea of how to code this.

Answer 1

You can use Split method:

 var parts = a.Split(new[] {"xxx", "yxxx"}, StringSplitOptions.None)
            .Select((s, index) =>
                {
                    string s1 = index%2 == 1 ? string.Format("{0}{2}{1}", "xxx", "yxxx", s + "1") : s;
                    return s1;
                });

  var result = string.Join("", parts);