Parsing/formatting data from serial port - C#

Question

I\'ve developed a small program that listens to a serial port. My program is receiving data. The problem is, its not displaying it in the desired format (one string). The da

Answer 1

Assuming there is no termination character, something like this may work. The tricky part is figuring out when to print a new line.

You may try inserting a newline before every ID: (e.g., replace "ID:" with "\r\n\ID:"). This will still sometimes fail when you receive StreetType:AveI first and then "D:23566 St" next. To fix this, you could just look for any I after StreetType:, but that's not as easy as it sounds either -- what if you see 345 Stre, etTy, pe:RdI. Also, what if I is a valid character (tType:DRI,VE ID:23525)?

I think that the following code should correctly handle these cases. Note that I switched from Console.WriteLine to Console.Write and manually add the new line when needed:

private static var previousStringPerPort = new Dictionary();
private static void Port_DataReceived(object sender, 
                                      SerialDataReceivedEventArgs e)
{
    SerialPort spL = (SerialPort) sender;
    int bufSize = 20;
    Byte[] dataBuffer = new Byte[bufSize];
    Console.WriteLine("Data Received at"+DateTime.Now);
    Console.WriteLine(spL.Read(dataBuffer, 0, bufSize));
    if (!previousStringPerPort.ContainsKey(spL))
        previousStringPerPort[spL] = "";
    string s = previousStringPerPort[spL] + 
               System.Text.ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetString(dataBuffer);
    s = s.Replace("ID:",Environment.NewLine + "ID:");
    if (s.EndsWith("I"))
    {
        previousStringPerPort[spL] = "I";
        s = s.Remove(s.Length-1);
    }
    else if (s.EndsWith("ID"))
    {
        previousStringPerPort[spL] = "ID";
        s = s.Remove(s.Length - 2);
    }
    Console.Write(s);
}

Now the only problem remaining is that if the last record really does end in I or ID, it will never be printed. A periodic timeout to flush the previous string could fix this, but it introduces (many) more problems of its own.