CODEWITHSUNDEEP
vb.netlinqsplit
Lou
Lou

Reputation: 2509

How to split and trim a string in one line

I want to Split a string and then Trim the results in one single line.
So the string:

 "psychology ¦ history ¦ geography"

should return the following members without trailing or leading spaces:

psychology
history
geography

I've tried:

String.Split("¦").Trim

but Trim does not work for arrays. Is there a one-line method, no matter how dirty, that does this job?

I'm sure this has been duped many times but I couldn't find the relevant solution for VB.Net. Please don't just link to a question in another language without explaining how I can convert the solution to VB.Net.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 4107

Answers (2)

Will Rickards
Will Rickards

Reputation: 2786

If you don't have embedded spaces in the items, you can just pass the space character as a separator as well as pipe. Combine that with the remove empty entries option and multiple space separators aren't an issue. If you need to handle other whitespace characters, you can add those.

input.Split(New String() {"|", " "}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)

Upvotes: 0

Jimi
Jimi

Reputation: 32278

You can Split and Trim your string in one line using the LINQ's Select method.

Both assigning the string to a local variable:

Dim input As String = "psychology ¦ history ¦ geography"
Dim result1 = input.Split("¦"c).Select((Function(s) s.Trim))

Or directly using the string as source:

Dim result2 = "psychology ¦ history ¦ geography".Split("¦"c).Select((Function(s) s.Trim))

Note that the Type of result1 and result2 is now an IEnumerable(Of String), not an array:
LINQ's methods return a IEnumerable<T> if not otherwise instructed.
Also note that this syntax supposes that Option Infer is On. If you keep it Off, you need to declare the type explicitly:

Dim result As IEnumerable(Of String) = (...)

If you need a string Array as output, you need to ask:

Dim result3 As String() = input.Split("¦"c).Select((Function(s) s.Trim)).ToArray()


About the Type Characters (c) appended to the Split method parameter:

From the Visual Basic Language Reference: Char Data Type

Type Characters. Appending the literal type character C to a single-character string literal forces it to the Char data type. Char has no identifier type character.

Upvotes: 5

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