C# LINQ: How is string(“[1, 2, 3]”) parsed as an array?

Question

I am trying to parse a string into array and find a very concise approach.

string line = \"[1, 2, 3]\";
string[] input = line.Substring(1, line.Length - 2).S         


        

Answer 1

The reason it does not work unless you skip the first two lines is that these lines have commas after ints. Your input looks like this:

"1," "2," "3"

Only the last entry can be parsed as an int; the initial two will produce an exception.

Passing comma and space as separators to Split will fix the problem:

string[] input = line
    .Substring(1, line.Length - 2)
    .Split(new[] {',', ' '}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

Note the use of StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries to remove empty strings caused by both comma and space being used between entries.