Finding a word - String Operationg or Linq

Question

Hey All,

I have a string full of a few hundred words.

How would I get each "word" (this can also be a single letter number or punctuation), and as each "word" is found, it is removed from the string.

Is this possible?

Example:

String:

"this is a string full of words and letters and also some punctuation! and num6er5."

As far as the algorithm is concerned, there are exactly 15 words in the above string.

Answer 1

You need to define what are the non-word characters and then you can use String.Split() :

  string text = "the quick brown fox";
  string[] words = text.Split(' ', '.', ',', '\t', StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

Answer 2

What you're trying to do is known as tokenizing.

In C#, the string Split() function works pretty well. If it's used like in Niedermair's code without any parameters, it returns an array of strings split (splitted?) by any spaces like this:

"I have spaces" -> {"I", "have", "spaces"}

You can also give any chars to split on as a parameter to Split() (for instance, ',' or ';' to handle csv files).

The Split() method pays no heed to what goes into the strings, so any letters, numbers and other chars will be handled.

About removing the words from the string: You might want to write the string into a buffer to achieve this, but I seriously think that's going too far. Strings are immutable which means any time you remove the "next word" you'll have to recreate the entire string object. It will be a lot easier to just Split() the entire string, throw the string away, and work with the array from there on.