Split using delimiter except when delimiter is escaped

Question

I\'m reading clipboard data coming from excel using

var stream = (System.IO.Stream) ( Forms.Clipboard.GetDataObject() ).GetData( Forms.DataFormats.CommaSepara

Answer 1

From your input example, we can see that there are three "unwanted" sequences of characters:

\"
\",
,\"

So, add all these sequences to the input array for the Split method:

string[] result = clipData.Split(new[] { @",\""", @"\"",", @"\""" }, 
    StringSplitOptions.None);

This will give you an array containing a few empty elements. If that is a problem, use StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries instead of StringSplitOptions.None:

string[] result = clipData.Split(new[] { @",\""", @"\"",", @"\""" }, 
    StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);