C# Advanced query statement String Processing

Question

I'm looking for either a best practise or library for processing string into an object tree..

here is the example:

"[age] = '37' And [gender] Is Not Null And [optindate] > '2003/01/01' And [idnumber] Is Null And ([saresident] = '52' Or [citizenship] Like 'abc%')"

I should be able to objectize this into a tree something like this:

{attribute='age', operator='=', value='37', opperand='And'}
{attribute='gender', operator='Is Not Null', value='', opperand='And'}
{attribute='optindate', operator='>', value='2003/01/01', opperand='And'}

etc....

any suggestions would be great!

Answer 1

How about the dynamic LINQ library? You could either use "as is", or look at how it builds an Expression<Func<T,bool>> predicate (which is the tree).

Answer 2

Have a look at Regular Expressions

Answer 3

If you need to store the operations in a tree structure, you should use the postfix or prefix notation. e.g. age = 37 and gender is not null should be stored as

and = age 37 != gender null

so the tree should be like

        and
   =         !=
age 37  gender  null

You can use these links for more details: Notation Used for Operations and Expressions, Conversion and Evaluation with C (All you need to know about Expressions)