C# reading a text line by line, where line delimiter is a custom

Question

I have an array of bytes (say byte[] data), which contains text with custom line delimiters, for example: "\r\n" (CRLF "\x0D\x0A"), "\r", "\n", "\x0D\x0A\x0D" or even "@".

At the moment I'm going to use the following solution:

1. Normalize line breaks to CRLF (here is an example how to normalize CRLF http://stackoverflow.com/questions/841396/what-is-a-quick-way-to-force-crlf-in-c-net)

2. Use StringReader to read text line by line

   
   using (String Reader sr = new StringReader(data.ToString()))
   {
       string line;
       while ((line = sr.ReadLine()) != null)
       {
           // Process the line 
       }
   }
   

I'm using C#, .NET 3.5. Is there any better solution?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Here's one option to limit calls to string.Replace to just the multi-character delimiters.

private static readonly char[] DelimiterChars = { '\r', '\n', '@' };
private static readonly string[] DelimiterStrings = { "\r\n\r", "\r\n" };

Then later...

string text = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(data);
foreach (string delim in DelimiterStrings)
    text = text.Replace(delim, "\n");

foreach (string line in text.Split(DelimiterChars))
{
    // processing here
}

Answer 2

Use regexp instead, which will give you much more flexibility.