CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netregexwindows
oe a
oe a

Reputation: 2280

Parsing out key value from string

I have a file im trying to parse that is written in this format:

command -l KEY "VALUE"

My goal is to get the KEY and the VALUE, which is inside double quotes.

Every line begins with the same command -l. Right now, im doing this a rather inefficient way. I'm getting a substring deleting the first 11 characters, trimming out everything after the space and then getting another substring with the quoted characters.

Surely there must be a better way to do this and I think REGEX is that solution. I've been following this page here but am totally lost: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms174214.aspx

Would appreciate any advice.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 91

Answers (2)

techmanmike
techmanmike

Reputation: 21

I would use a command line parser package available from nuget (like https://www.nuget.org/packages/CommandLineParser/1.9.71)

There are plenty of them around and then you don't have to worry about handling all error or special cases.

Upvotes: 1

Chris Shain
Chris Shain

Reputation: 51319

For a simple string parsing exercise like this, it's very unlikely that regex will perform significantly better than manually taking a substring then calling string.Split(" "). For example:

public KeyValuePair<string, string> Parse(string input) {
    var split = input.Substring(11).Split(' ');
    return new KeyValuePair<string, string>(split[0], split[1].Replace("\"",""));
}

Upvotes: 1

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