Split string into multiple lines

Question

I have a long string of comments that I'd like to split into multiple lines.

It's currently displayed as <%= Html.Encode(item.important_notes) %> I've played with using .Substring to split it, but can't figure out how to prevent it from splitting in the middle of a word. Instead of characters 1-100 on line 1 and 101-200 on line 2, I'd like to do something like character 1 through the last space before character 100 on line one. That character through the last space before the next 100 characters on line 2, etc.

What is the best way to do this?

EDIT: using ASP.NET-MVC

Answer 1

Without being able to speak specifically to your issue, I would suggest you look into regular expressions. Regular expressions are able to handle complex text patterns with ease. You may have a split function available to you that takes just such a regular expression and returns an array of Strings.

Answer 2

I would use a combination of substring and lastindexof. You get the last index of combined with a number to get the first space after your breakpoint.

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
while (base.Length > 100)
{
   if (!base.Contains(" ")) { break;
   sb.Append(base.Substring(0, base.Substring(0, 100).LastIndexOf(" ")));
   //code to trim down base
   sb.Append(/*newline*/);
}
sb.Append(base);

Written adhoc, but you get the idea.