Does C# have built-in support for parsing page-number strings?

Question

Does C# have built-in support for parsing strings of page numbers? By page numbers, I mean the format you might enter into a print dialog that\'s a mixture of comma and das

Answer 1

Keith's approach seems nice. I put together a more naive approach using lists. This has error checking so hopefully should pick up most problems:-

public List parsePageNumbers(string input) {
  if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(input))
    throw new InvalidOperationException("Input string is empty.");

  var pageNos = input.Split(',');

  var ret = new List();
  foreach(string pageString in pageNos) {
    if (pageString.Contains("-")) {
      parsePageRange(ret, pageString);
    } else {
      ret.Add(parsePageNumber(pageString));
    }
  }

  ret.Sort();
  return ret.Distinct().ToList();
}

private int parsePageNumber(string pageString) {
  int ret;

  if (!int.TryParse(pageString, out ret)) {
    throw new InvalidOperationException(
      string.Format("Page number '{0}' is not valid.", pageString));
  }

  return ret;
}

private void parsePageRange(List pageNumbers, string pageNo) {
  var pageRange = pageNo.Split('-');

  if (pageRange.Length != 2)
    throw new InvalidOperationException(
      string.Format("Page range '{0}' is not valid.", pageNo));

  int startPage = parsePageNumber(pageRange[0]),
    endPage = parsePageNumber(pageRange[1]);

  if (startPage > endPage) {
    throw new InvalidOperationException(
      string.Format("Page number {0} is greater than page number {1}" +
      " in page range '{2}'", startPage, endPage, pageNo));
  }

  pageNumbers.AddRange(Enumerable.Range(startPage, endPage - startPage + 1));
}