Have the following line of code
// Load screen containers
serverTest = document.SelectSingleNode("Server/". this.serverName . "/test").InnerText;
C# isn't liking the "." concatenation character, not sure what to do here.
serverTest is a property of my class btw
Oops was using PHP concatenation character, was using that language an hour ago.
Could one of the mods delete this one, sorry for taking up space.
You have to do something like this.
document.SelectSingleNode(#"Server/" + this.serverName + #"/test").InnerText;
For string concatenation, use the "+" plus operator or maybe string.Format if it contains a lot of variables
document.SelectSingleNode(#"Server/" + this.serverName + #"/app").InnerText;
For lots of variables (multiple parameters may be usable once you require attribute based retrieval of nodes):-
// for [Server/localhost/App/MyApp/Module/Admin/Action/Test"
var location = string.Format(#"Server/{0}/App/{1}/Module/{2}/Action/{3}", this.serverName, this.appName, this.moduleName, this.actionName);
document.SelectSingleNode(location).InnerText;
By separating the location from the retrieval function, you can easily debug it and log in case any value is improper. Also makes code readable IMHO.
However for a single value, using concatenation inline can be ok in most cases.
Related
I need to do some very light parsing of C# (actually transpiled Razor code) to replace a list of function calls with textual replacements.
If given a set containing {"Foo.myFunc" : "\"def\"" } it should replace this code:
var res = "abc" + Foo.myFunc(foo, Bar.otherFunc( Baz.funk()));
with this:
var res = "abc" + "def"
I don't care about the nested expressions.
This seems fairly trivial and I think I should be able to avoid building an entire C# parser using something like this for every member of the mapping set:
find expression start (e.g. Foo.myFunc)
Push()/Pop() parentheses on a Stack until Count == 0.
Mark this as expression stop
replace everything from expression start until expression stop
But maybe I don't need to ... Is there a (possibly built-in) .NET library that can do this for me? Counting is not possible in the family of languages that RE is in, but maybe the extended regex syntax in C# can handle this somehow using back references?
edit:
As the comments to this answer demonstrates simply counting brackets will not be sufficient generally, as something like trollMe("(") will throw off those algorithms. Only true parsing would then suffice, I guess (?).
The trick for a normal string will be:
(?>"(\\"|[^"])*")
A verbatim string:
(?>#"(""|[^"])*")
Maybe this can help, but I'm not sure that this will work in all cases:
<func>(?=\()((?>/\*.*?\*/)|(?>#"(""|[^"])*")|(?>"(\\"|[^"])*")|\r?\n|[^()"]|(?<open>\()|(?<-open>\)))+?(?(open)(?!))
Replace <func> with your function name.
Useless to say that trollMe("\"(", "((", #"abc""de((f") works as expected.
DEMO
I am trying to figure out a viable way to go about parsing this CSV file. Currently I am using filehelpers which is great. But with this csv file it seems to be having issues.
Each record in the the csv file is contained in quotes and delimited by a comma.
The records have commas within them and 1 record out of the 90,000 records im dealing with has one single " that mucks up the Readline.
The record looks like this "24" Blah ",
So I'm looking to write a regex to insert into the BeforeReadRecord that will go through and replace all instances of " with a space.
I'm newer to regex but I'm not finding any way to exclude three cases.
Case one: each line starts with a "
Case two: each line ends with a "
Case three: each field is separated by ","
I am trying to figure out how I could exclude those three cases and be left to just replace any straggler " .
So far I've been failing miserably and am not even sure if there is a way to accomplish this. Perhaps someone knows of a better csv parser that handles this one odd case as well?
EDIT: Well here's what I ended up with. It takes a little time to process(also just changes any outlier " to ' which is fine since the data that contains quotes is needed for any queries) but looking for any pitfalls I may be falling in to make it faster but it seemed to be the quickest solution so far(took about 7 seconds for 92,000 records) but there doesn't seem any way around checking every line so... My previous solution was a nasty nested if that seemed to 30 seconds or so over the course of processing the records. It accounts for all scenarios except for where someone decides to put a random ", at the end of a field... hoping I don't run into a record like this but it wouldn't surprise me.
in its own method{
engine.BeforeReadRecord += (sender, args) =>
args.RecordLine = checkQuote(args.RecordLine);
var records = engine.ReadFile(reportFilePath);
}
private static string checkQuote(string checkString)
{
if (checkString.Substring(0, 1) == #"""")
{
string removeQuote = #"""" + checkString.Replace(#"""", "'").Replace(#"','", #""",""").Remove(checkString.Length-1,1).Remove(0,1) + #"""";
return removeQuote;
}
else
return checkString; }
File format readers typically don't handle malformed input well. Why should they? If you give a CSV reader bad data, I would expect it to barf. I've rarely had good luck with computer software that makes assumptions about what I meant.
Do you really need a regular expression? If you define a straggler as the last quote character when the number is odd, then it's trivial to remove the last one: just count them and if the number is odd, remove the last one.
For example:
var quoteCount = inputString.Count(c => c == '\"');
if ((quoteCount % 2) == 1)
{
inputString = inputString.Remove(inputString.LastIndexOf('\"'));
}
Done and done.
You could also do it in a single pass with a loop, but that's probably overkill. I strongly suspect that sanitizing the input is not a major bottleneck in your program.
For more complex patterns (i.e. you're looking for "," or for a quote at the start and end, you just write a simple state machine. It's probably a dozen lines of code.
I realize that you might be able to do this with regular expressions. I find regex great for finding stuff and doing simple replacements. For more complicated rules like "replace quote with space unless the quote is at the beginning or end of line or next to a comma", I find it hard to come up with a good expression. For example, what about this case:
"first name","last name","","phone"
You have to take that blank field (i.e. "") into account. You also have to take into account spaces between fields (i.e. "first" , "last" , ""), and a whole host of other things. I'm reasonably sure that regex can do it. My experience has been that I can usually write the simple state machine and prove that it's correct faster than I can puzzle out the required regex. And it's certain that I'll more easily understand the state machine six months later.
really simple question... just want to represent double quote " without needing to do "" or \"
cases that I'm aware of:
var s=#"123 "" 456 """;
var s="123 \" 456 \"";
It'd make a reasonalbe difference if I could remove this noise somehow. The reason is that the escape sequence \ and the double quote have meaning in a domain specific language (DSL) that we're using. Sometimes it's convenient to throw some syntax inline into a C# string.
What I'd like is a way to tell .net not to touch it. Perhaps some kind of catch all via the DLR?
Within a C# literal, there's nothing you can to - don't forget this is all done at compile-time.
If you don't use single quotes, you could always do:
var s = "123 ' 456 '".Replace("'", "\"");
(Or choose some other character you don't use much, and replace that afterwards instead.)
Other than that, avoiding storing lots of data in your source code helps a lot with this sort of thing - for test data, I often use an embedded resource and load that in at execution time.
I don't suppose you could just read them in from a file or database?
Yeah, there's definitely a way to do that, and I use it all the time for exactly that reason.
You create a string resource collection (open Project Properties, Resources, make sure it's on Strings) and put your literal strings in there. Then, when you need one of those strings, use the Properties.Resources.{insert string resource name} reference to collect it in a pure and unadulterated form!
For completeness, I'll mention that you can use hex in a C# string, so in this case, \x0022. Note that you can omit the leading 0's if the character immediately following isn't hex.
Working on a program that takes a CSV file and splits on each ",". The issue I have is there are thousand separators in some of the numbers. In the CSV file, the numbers render correctly. When viewed as a text document, they are shown like below:
Dog,Cat,100,100,Fish
In a CSV file, there are four cells, with the values "Dog", "Cat", "100,000", "Fish". When I split on the "," to an array of strings, it contains 5 elements, when what I want is 4. Anyone know a way to work around this?
Thanks
There are two common mistakes made when reading csv code: using a split() function and using regular expressions. Both approaches are wrong, in that they are prone to corner cases such as yours and slower than they could be.
Instead, use a dedicated parser such as Microsoft.VisualBasic.TextFieldParser, CodeProject's FastCSV or Linq2csv, or my own implemention here on Stack Overflow.
Typically, CSV files would wrap these elements in quotes, causing your line to be displayed as:
Dog,Cat,"100,100",Fish
This would parse correctly (if using a reasonable method, ie: the TextFieldParser class or a 3rd party library), and avoid this issue.
I would consider your file as an error case - and would try to correct the issue on the generation side.
That being said, if that is not possible, you will need to have more information about the data structure in the file to correct this. For example, in this case, you know you should have 4 elements - if you find five, you may need to merge back together the 3rd and 4th, since those two represent the only number within the line.
This is not possible in a general case, however - for example, take the following:
100,100,100
If that is 2 numbers, should it be 100100, 100, or should it be 100, 100100? There is no way to determine this without more information.
you might want to have a look at the free opensource project FileHelpers. If you MUST use your own code, here is a primer on the CSV "standard" format
well you could always split on ("\",\"") and then trim the first and last element.
But I would look into regular expressions that match elements with in "".
Don't just split on the , split on ", ".
Better still, use a CSV library from google or codeplex etc
Reading a CSV file in .NET?
You may be able to use Regex.Replace to get rid of specifically the third comma as per below before parsing?
Replaces up to a specified number of occurrences of a pattern specified in the Regex constructor with a replacement string, starting at a specified character position in the input string. A MatchEvaluator delegate is called at each match to evaluate the replacement.
[C#] public string Replace(string, MatchEvaluator, int, int);
I ran into a similar issue with fields with line feeds in. Im not convinced this is elegant, but... For mine I basically chopped mine into lines, then if the line didnt start with a text delimeter, I appended it to the line above.
You could try something like this : Step through each field, if the field has an end text delimeter, move to the next, if not, grab the next field, appaend it, rince and repeat till you do have an end delimeter (allows for 1,000,000,000 etc) ..
(Im caffeine deprived, and hungry, I did write some code but it was so ugly, I didnt even post it)
Do you know that it will always contain exactly four columns? If so, this quick-and-dirty LINQ code would work:
string[] elements = line.Split(',');
string element1 = elements.ElementAt(0);
string element2 = elements.ElementAt(1);
// Exclude the first two elements and the last element.
var element3parts = elements.Skip(2).Take(elements.Count() - 3);
int element3 = Convert.ToInt32(string.Join("",element3parts));
string element4 = elements.Last();
Not elegant, but it works.
I get from another class string that must be converted to char. It usually contains only one char and that's not a problem. But control chars i receive like '\\n' or '\\t'.
Is there standard methods to convert this to endline or tab char or i need to parse it myself?
edit:
Sorry, parser eat one slash. I receive '\\t'
I assume that you mean that the class that sends you the data is sending you a string like "\n". In that case you have to parse this yourself using:
Char.Parse(returnedChar)
Otherwise you can just cast it to a string like this
(string)returnedChar
New line:
string escapedNewline = #"\\n";
string cleanupNewLine = escapedNewline.Replace(#"\\n", Environment.NewLine);
OR
string cleanupNewLine = escapedNewline.Replace(#"\\n", "\n");
Tab:
string escapedTab = #"\\t";
string cleanupTab= escapedTab.Replace(#"\\t", "\t");
Note the lack of the literal string (i.e. i did not use #"\t" because that will not represent a Tab)
Alternatively you could consider Regular Expressions if you need to replace a range of different string patterns.
You should probably write a utility function to encapsulate the common behaviour above for all the possible Escape Sequences
Then you'd write some Unit Tests to cover each of the cases you can think of.
As you encounter any bugs you add more unit tests to cover those cases.
UPDATE
You could represent a tab in the XML with a special character sequence:
see this article
This article applies to SQL Server but may well be relevant to C# also?
To be absolutely sure, you could try generating a string with a tab in it and putting it into some XML (programmatically) and using XmlSerializer to serialize that to a file to see what the output is, then you can be sure that this will faithfully 'round-trip' the string with the tab still in it.
how about using string.ToCharArray()
You can then add the appropriate logic to process whatever was in the string.
char.parse(string); is used to convert string to char and you can do vice versa
char.tostring();
100% solved