Develop Reference

Calling a Python script from C# - changing the script's filepath causes the program to not work

The following code works perfectly without flaw:
public partial class MainForm : Form
{
string pyInterp = File.ReadAllText(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + #"\config\pathToPythonInterpreter.txt");
string pyWeather = #"C:\getWeather.py";
public MainForm()
{
InitializeComponent();
UpdateWeather();
}
public void UpdateWeather()
{
labelWeather.Text = PySharp.ExecutePy(pyInterp, pyWeather);
}
}
However, when I change the path to getWeather.py to not be in an arbitrary random location, like this:
string pyWeather = Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + #"\scripts\getWeather.py";
Then my program no longer obtains the script's output. The script still works: I launched it using IDLE and it completed its function properly. When I call it using C#, the console opens, yet no output is obtained.
The Python script is the following:
from requests import get
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as soup
r = get("http://www.ilmateenistus.ee/ilm/prognoosid/4-oopaeva-prognoos/")
parsed = soup(r.content, "html.parser")
container = parsed.find("div",{"class":"point kuusiku"})
print(str(container["data-title"]))
(It webscrapes my local weather)
PySharp.ExecutePy() can be viewed here
By far the strangest bug I've ever encountered. Any ideas?
EDIT 1: It seems that C# is indeed reading something from the script. It just appears that this something is.. nothing. I gave the label a default sample text, and after running the program, the label's text is simply changed to an empty string. Hope this incredible discovery helps somehow.
EDIT 2: The program fails to call the script correctly when its filepath contains spaces. For example:
C:\foo bar\testing\pyWeather.py
does not work!

Try surrounding the path that contains spaces with 2 double quotes.
For e.g.
string pyWeather = #"""C:\Users\[myname]\Documents\Visual Studio 2017\Projects\testing\testing\scripts\getWeather.py""";
Similarly, you can do string pyWeather = Directory.GetCurrentDirectory() + #"\scripts\getWeather.py"; followed by pyWeather = "\"" + pyWeather + "\"";.

I would want you to return the answer instead of printing. Printer is an I/O based solution to display. So it will work super fine with IDLE however it may not return results as you expected. I strongly believe this will solve your problem.
instead of printing please try return. I can give more support after trying this.
return(str(container["data-title"]))

"&" and Apostrophe shows up a symbols

I am getting data from a web service end point and place it into a list in a for each loop. The service gets it's data from a Wordpress website.
var list = new ItemList
(
(string)data.id.ToString(),
(string)data.name,
(string)subcategory
);
I then print this on the XAML page. The code works fine in that it successfully gets the data from the service and prints it on the page of my windows 8 app.
However in (string)data.name,, which is the name of the items, if the name contains a "&" it shows up in the app as $#038;. Also if a item name contains a "'", apostrophe s, it shows up as ’.
EG. D & G, shows up as D $#038; G
The "&" and "'" show up as these weird symbols.
How do I get rid of these and fix it so that they render correctly in the app.

I'm going to take the risk of giving you a wrong hint, because I guess you're talking about a Windows 8 Store App (XAML), thus you don't have access to every class on .NET, but...
What about decoding HTML entities?
Check this HttpUtility method: HtmlUtility.HtmlDecode.
Check WebUtility.HtmlDecode, which is on System.dll, thus available for Windows 8 Store Apps.
You'll need to add a reference to System.Web on your Visual Studio project.

It looks like the service is returning XML escaped entities. & means a character with a code of (decimal) 38 (which is &). ’ is similar and means a code of 8217 (which is ’).
You can decode these using System.Web.HttpUtility.HtmlDecode(inputString), but that requires a reference to System.Web. If you don't want to or cannot reference that, you can try something like this:
var xml = new XmlDocument();
xml.LoadXml("<x>" + inputString + "</x>");
var output = xml.InnerText;
Given Testing ’stuff" & things, it will return Testing ’stuff" & things.
I'd go with HtmlDecode() if you can, but absolutely try and avoid rolling your own decoder unless you have no other choice.

You can use WebUtility.HtmlDecode Method (String)
Or you can use if you don't want to add additional libraries.
public string Decode(string text)
{
var replacements = new Dictionary<string, char> {
{ "’", ''' },
// ...etc
}
var sb = new StringBuilder( text );
foreach( var c in replacements.Keys ) {
sb.Replace( c.ToString(), replacements[c] );
}
return sb.ToString();
}

Why does StringBuilder.AppendLine not add a new line with some strings?

I'm trying to use stringbuilder to create a body of string to be used in a text (not HTML) email. However some lines (where i include dynamic data, a new line is not added, but in some the newline works as intended.
Is there something basic i'm missing when using the stringbuilder class or is there some more fundamental process that should be happening?
in the below code:
sbUser.AppendLine("Please find below confirmation of your registration details. If any of these details are incorrect, please email someone#somewhere.com");
sbUser.AppendLine();
sbUser.AppendLine("Selected event : " + ContentPage.FetchByID(int.Parse(ddlEvent.SelectedValue)).PageTitle);
sbUser.AppendLine("Date of event : " + thisEvent.EventStartDate.ToString("dd MMM yyyy"));
sbUser.AppendLine("==============================================================");
sbUser.AppendLine();
(ContentPage and thisEvent are custom classes built using Subsonic(v2). PageTitle is an output type of string)
is get this as an output:
Please find below confirmation of your registration details. If any of these details are incorrect, please email someone#somewhere.com
Selected event : My Event Date of event : 16 Sept 2012 ==============================================================
as you can see, everything after the 3rd line in the code makes everything go on to one line.
however, further down the code i use:
sbRR.AppendLine("First name : " + txtFirstname.Text.Trim());
sbRR.AppendLine("Surname : " + txtSurname.Text.Trim());
etc,
and all these appear on seperate lines correctly. I can't see why this is happening.
the email is composed as such
mailMessage.Body = sbUser.ToString() + sbRR.ToString();
adding the following code:
sbUser.AppendLine("Selected event : " + ContentPage.FetchByID(int.Parse(ddlEvent.SelectedValue)).PageTitle + Environment.NewLine);
sbUser.AppendLine("Date of event : " + thisEvent.EventStartDate.ToString("dd MMM yyyy") + Environment.NewLine);
produces the following output:
Selected event : My Event
Date of event : 16 Sept 2012
==============================================================
which works i suppose, except it's added 2 newlines (the AppendLine and the Environment.NewLine). it seems that pulling the data directly straight from the database into a stringbuilder seems to be messing with the line ending. Even if I add text after the database pull, it still stays on one line.
UPDATE
doing
StringBuilder.Append("blah"+Environment.NewLine)
produces the correct result, however i'm still not understanding why that works and .AppendLine("blah"+<database content>) doesn't work.

I know the question is old and has been marked as answered, but I thought I'd add this here in case anyone else comes across this as it's the first hit on Google for StringBuilder.AppendLine() not working.
I had the same problem and it turned out to be an Outlook issue. Outlook re-formats text based emails by removing extra line breaks. You can click "We removed extra line breaks in this message -> Restore line breaks" in the header of the individual email, or change the setting that does this nasty little trick "Options->Mail->Message Format->Remove extra line breaks in plain text messages"
The workaround (since you can't control the settings on every potential email target) I found here Newsletter Formatting And The Remove Extra Line Breaks Issue.
Basically, if you add two white space characters to the beginning of each line, Outlook won't reformat the email.
Here's an extension method to help (method name is a bit verbose so change to your liking :))
namespace System.Text
{
public static class StringBuilderExtensions
{
public static void AppendLineWithTwoWhiteSpacePrefix(this StringBuilder sb, string value)
{
sb.AppendFormat("{0}{1}{2}", " ", value, Environment.NewLine);
}
public static void AppendLineWithTwoWhiteSpacePrefix(this StringBuilder sb)
{
sb.AppendFormat("{0}{1}", " ", Environment.NewLine);
}
}
}

Instead of
sbUser.AppendLine();
Try using
sbUser.Append(Environment.NewLine);
No idea why this works...

use Environment.NewLine
sbUser.AppendLine("Please find below confirmation of your registration details. If any of these details are incorrect, please email someone#somewhere.com");
sbUser.AppendLine(Environment.NewLine);
sbUser.AppendLine("Selected event : " + ContentPage.FetchByID(int.Parse(ddlEvent.SelectedValue)).PageTitle);
sbUser.AppendLine("Date of event : " + thisEvent.EventStartDate.ToString("dd MMM yyyy"));
sbUser.AppendLine("==============================================================");
sbUser.AppendLine(Environment.NewLine);

use Environment.NewLine after each line or where you want new line
eg:-
sbUser.AppendLine("Please find below confirmation of your registration details. If any of these details are incorrect, please email someone#somewhere.com" + Environment.NewLine);
sbUser.AppendLine("Selected event : " + ContentPage.FetchByID(int.Parse(ddlEvent.SelectedValue)).PageTitle);

Windows 10 Insider preview Build 15007. The Default Line Terminator and the Environment.NewLine are both "\n". To use "\r\n" I had to create a string constant and use it instead.

First
sbUser.Appendline();
Second
sbUser.Append("texto loco ");
Voila!
=)

Variables, strings and increasing frustration

I'm pretty new to C# and am having a mare trying to get what should be a simple task to work, in a nutshell I've written a PowerShell script to create VApps within a vSphere environment, the PoSh script works perfectly, next I have created (my first go) a Windows Console Application to run (initially) this script with user input, here's the problem, within my console app I'm using Process.Start to call my PoSh script and pass parameters, but, they come out joined up and completely missing the last parameter, here's the line in question:
Process.Start("Powershell.exe","-ExecutionPolicy bypass F:\\hello.ps1 -Location " + location + " -AppName" + appname);
AppName is completely ignored and Location tends to come out as -Locationanywhere instead of -Location Anywhere, I'm sure it's something basic and I've trawled the usual group and RTFM but no joy!
Hello.ps1 is a test script that just records the parameters passed to it so I can check the output before touching my real script.
Any help gratefully received.

You're lacking a space between -AppName and the double quotes.
string.Format is a useful method in .Net - it allows you to easily replace placeholders with dynamic content in a way that makes viewing the 'complete' string intuitive:
string parameters = string.Format("-ExecutionPolicy bypass F:\\hello.ps1 -Location {0} -AppName {1}", location, appName);
Process.Start("Powershell.exe", parameters);

I'm not sure, but I think you need an space between -AppName and the appname
" -AppName " + appname
It's all I can help you :(

Might I suggest using String.Format() instead of using the + operator?
String.Format("-ExecutionPolicy bypass F:\\hello.ps1 -Location {0} -AppName {1}", location, appname)

Does C# have an equivalent to JavaScript's encodeURIComponent()?

In JavaScript:
encodeURIComponent("©√") == "%C2%A9%E2%88%9A"
Is there an equivalent for C# applications? For escaping HTML characters I used:
txtOut.Text = Regex.Replace(txtIn.Text, #"[\u0080-\uFFFF]",
m => #"&#" + ((int)m.Value[0]).ToString() + ";");
But I'm not sure how to convert the match to the correct hexadecimal format that JS uses. For example this code:
txtOut.Text = Regex.Replace(txtIn.Text, #"[\u0080-\uFFFF]",
m => #"%" + String.Format("{0:x}", ((int)m.Value[0])));
Returns "%a9%221a" for "©√" instead of "%C2%A9%E2%88%9A". It looks like I need to split the string up into bytes or something.
Edit: This is for a windows app, the only items available in System.Web are: AspNetHostingPermission, AspNetHostingPermissionAttribute, and AspNetHostingPermissionLevel.

Uri.EscapeDataString or HttpUtility.UrlEncode is the correct way to escape a string meant to be part of a URL.
Take for example the string "Stack Overflow":
HttpUtility.UrlEncode("Stack Overflow") --> "Stack+Overflow"
Uri.EscapeUriString("Stack Overflow") --> "Stack%20Overflow"
Uri.EscapeDataString("Stack + Overflow") --> Also encodes "+" to "%2b" ---->Stack%20%2B%20%20Overflow
Only the last is correct when used as an actual part of the URL (as opposed to the value of one of the query string parameters)

HttpUtility.HtmlEncode / Decode
HttpUtility.UrlEncode / Decode
You can add a reference to the System.Web assembly if it's not available in your project

I tried to do full compatible analog of javascript's encodeURIComponent for c# and after my 4 hour experiments I found this
c# CODE:
string a = "!##$%^&*()_+ some text here али мамедов баку";
a = System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode(a);
a = a.Replace("+", "%20");
the result is:
!%40%23%24%25%5e%26*()_%2b%20some%20text%20here%20%d0%b0%d0%bb%d0%b8%20%d0%bc%d0%b0%d0%bc%d0%b5%d0%b4%d0%be%d0%b2%20%d0%b1%d0%b0%d0%ba%d1%83
After you decode It with Javascript's decodeURLComponent();
you will get this:
!##$%^&*()_+ some text here али мамедов баку
Thank You for attention

System.Uri.EscapeUriString() didn't seem to do anything, but System.Uri.EscapeDataString() worked for me.

Try Server.UrlEncode(), or System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode() for instances when you don't have access to the Server object. You can also use System.Uri.EscapeUriString() to avoid adding a reference to the System.Web assembly.

For a Windows Store App, you won't have HttpUtility. Instead, you have:
For an URI, before the '?':
System.Uri.EscapeUriString("example.com/Stack Overflow++?")
-> "example.com/Stack%20Overflow++?"
For an URI query name or value, after the '?':
System.Uri.EscapeDataString("Stack Overflow++")
-> "Stack%20Overflow%2B%2B"
For a x-www-form-urlencoded query name or value, in a POST content:
System.Net.WebUtility.UrlEncode("Stack Overflow++")
-> "Stack+Overflow%2B%2B"

You can use the Server object in the System.Web namespace
Server.UrlEncode, Server.UrlDecode, Server.HtmlEncode, and Server.HtmlDecode.
Edit: poster added that this was a windows application and not a web one as one would believe. The items listed above would be available from the HttpUtility class inside System.Web which must be added as a reference to the project.