Split String in C#

Question

I thought this will be trivial but I can\'t get this to work.

Assume a line in a CSV file: \"Barack Obama\", 48, \"President\", \"1600 Penn Ave, Washington DC

Answer 1

You might have to write your own split function.

• Iterate through each char in the string
• When you hit a " character, toggle a boolean
• When you hit a comma, if the bool is true, ignore it, else, you have your token

Here's an example:

public static class StringExtensions
{
    public static string[] SplitQuoted(this string input, char separator, char quotechar)
    {
        List tokens = new List();

        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        bool escaped = false;
        foreach (char c in input)
        {
            if (c.Equals(separator) && !escaped)
            {
                // we have a token
                tokens.Add(sb.ToString().Trim());
                sb.Clear();
            }
            else if (c.Equals(separator) && escaped)
            {
                // ignore but add to string
                sb.Append(c);
            }
            else if (c.Equals(quotechar))
            {
                escaped = !escaped;
                sb.Append(c);
            }
            else
            {
                sb.Append(c);
            }
        }
        tokens.Add(sb.ToString().Trim());

        return tokens.ToArray();
    }
}

Then just call:

string[] tokens = line.SplitQuoted(',','\"');

---

Benchmarks

Results of benchmarking my code and Dan Tao's code are below. I'm happy to benchmark any other solutions if people want them?

Code:

string input = "\"Barak Obama\", 48, \"President\", \"1600 Penn Ave, Washington DC\""; // Console.ReadLine()
string[] tokens = null;

// run tests
DateTime start = DateTime.Now;
for (int i = 0; i < 1000000; i++)
    tokens = input.SplitWithQualifier(',', '\"', false);
Console.WriteLine("1,000,000 x SplitWithQualifier = {0}ms", DateTime.Now.Subtract(start).TotalMilliseconds);

start = DateTime.Now;
for (int i = 0; i<1000000;i++)
    tokens = input.SplitQuoted(',', '\"');
Console.WriteLine("1,000,000 x SplitQuoted =        {0}ms", DateTime.Now.Subtract(start).TotalMilliseconds);

Output:

1,000,000 x SplitWithQualifier = 8156.25ms
1,000,000 x SplitQuoted =        2406.25ms