Easiest way to split a string on newlines in .NET?

Question

I need to split a string into newlines in .NET and the only way I know of to split strings is with the Split method. However that will not allow me to (easily) split on a ne

Answer 1

For a string variable s:

s.Split(new string[]{Environment.NewLine},StringSplitOptions.None)

This uses your environment's definition of line endings. On Windows, line endings are CR-LF (carriage return, line feed) or in C#'s escape characters \r\n.

This is a reliable solution, because if you recombine the lines with String.Join, this equals your original string:

var lines = s.Split(new string[]{Environment.NewLine},StringSplitOptions.None);
var reconstituted = String.Join(Environment.NewLine,lines);
Debug.Assert(s==reconstituted);

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What not to do:

• Use StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries, because this will break markup such as Markdown where empty lines have syntactic purpose.
• Split on separator new char[]{Environment.NewLine}, because on Windows this will create one empty string element for each new line.