Alternative to if, else if

Question

I have a lot of if, else if statements and I know there has to be a better way to do this but even after searching stackoverflow I'm unsure of how to do so in my particular case.

I am parsing text files (bills) and assigning the name of the service provider to a variable (txtvar.Provider) based on if certain strings appear on the bill.

This is a small sample of what I'm doing (don't laugh, I know it's messy). All in all, There are approximately 300 if, else if's.

if (txtvar.BillText.IndexOf("SWGAS.COM") > -1)
{
    txtvar.Provider = "Southwest Gas";
}
else if (txtvar.BillText.IndexOf("georgiapower.com") > -1)
{
    txtvar.Provider = "Georgia Power";
}
else if (txtvar.BillText.IndexOf("City of Austin") > -1)
{
    txtvar.Provider = "City of Austin";
}
// And so forth for many different strings

I would like to use something like a switch statement to be more efficient and readable but I'm unsure of how I would compare the BillText. I'm looking for something like this but can't figure out how to make it work.

switch (txtvar.BillText)
{
    case txtvar.BillText.IndexOf("Southwest Gas") > -1:
        txtvar.Provider = "Southwest Gas";
        break;
    case txtvar.BillText.IndexOf("TexasGas.com") > -1:
        txtvar.Provider = "Texas Gas";
        break;
    case txtvar.BillText.IndexOf("Southern") > -1:
        txtvar.Provider = "Southern Power & Gas";
        break;
}

I'm definitely open to ideas.

I would need the ability to determine the order in which the values were evaluated. As you can imagine, when parsing for hundreds of slightly different layouts I occasionally run into the issue of not having a distinctly unique indicator as to what service provider the bill belongs to.

Answer 1

Why not use everything C# has to offer? The following use of anonymous types, collection initializers, implicitly typed variables, and lambda-syntax LINQ is compact, intuitive, and maintains your modified requirement that patterns be evaluated in order:

var providerMap = new[] {
    new { Pattern = "SWGAS.COM"       , Name = "Southwest Gas" },
    new { Pattern = "georgiapower.com", Name = "Georgia Power" },
    // More specific first
    new { Pattern = "City of Austin"  , Name = "City of Austin" },   
    // Then more general
    new { Pattern = "Austin"          , Name = "Austin Electric Company" }   
    // And for everything else:
    new { Pattern = String.Empty      , Name = "Unknown" }
};

txtVar.Provider = providerMap.First(p => txtVar.BillText.IndexOf(p.Pattern) > -1).Name; 

More likely, the pairs of patterns would come from a configurable source, such as:

var providerMap =
    System.IO.File.ReadLines(@"C:\some\folder\providers.psv")
    .Select(line => line.Split('|'))
    .Select(parts => new { Pattern = parts[0], Name = parts[1] }).ToList();

Finally, as @millimoose points out, anonymous types are less useful when passed between methods. In that case we can define a trival Provider class and use object initializers for nearly identical syntax:

class Provider { 
    public string Pattern { get; set; } 
    public string Name { get; set; } 
}

var providerMap =
    System.IO.File.ReadLines(@"C:\some\folder\providers.psv")
    .Select(line => line.Split('|'))
    .Select(parts => new Provider() { Pattern = parts[0], Name = parts[1] }).ToList();

Answer 2

Since you seem to need to search for the key before returning the value a Dictionary is the right way to go, but you will need to loop over it.

// dictionary to hold mappings
Dictionary<string, string> mapping = new Dictionary<string, string>();
// add your mappings here
// loop over the keys
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> item in mapping)
{
    // return value if key found
    if(txtvar.BillText.IndexOf(item.Key) > -1) {
        return item.Value;
    }
}

EDIT: If you wish to have control over the order in which elemnts are evaluated, use an OrderedDictionary and add the elements in the order in which you want them evaluated.

Answer 3

One more using LINQ and Dictionary

var mapping = new Dictionary<string, string>()
                        {
                            { "SWGAS.COM", "Southwest Gas" },
                            { "georgiapower.com", "Georgia Power" }
                            .
                            .
                        };

return mapping.Where(pair => txtvar.BillText.IndexOf(pair.Key) > -1)
              .Select(pair => pair.Value)
              .FirstOrDefault();

If we prefer empty string instead of null when no key matches we can use the ?? operator:

return mapping.Where(pair => txtvar.BillText.IndexOf(pair.Key) > -1)
              .Select(pair => pair.Value)
              .FirstOrDefault() ?? "";

If we should consider the dictionary contains similar strings we add an order by, alphabetically, shortest key will be first, this will pick 'SCE' before 'SCEC'

return mapping.Where(pair => txtvar.BillText.IndexOf(pair.Key) > -1)
              .OrderBy(pair => pair.Key)
              .Select(pair => pair.Value)
              .FirstOrDefault() ?? "";

Answer 4

To avoid the blatant Schlemiel the Painter's approach that looping over all the keys would involve: let's use regular expressions!

// a dictionary that holds which bill text keyword maps to which provider
static Dictionary<string, string> BillTextToProvider = new Dictionary<string, string> {
    {"SWGAS.COM", "Southwest Gas"},
    {"georgiapower.com", "Georgia Power"}
    // ...
};

// a regex that will match any of the keys of this dictionary
// i.e. any of the bill text keywords
static Regex BillTextRegex = new Regex(
    string.Join("|", // to alternate between the keywords
                from key in BillTextToProvider.Keys // grab the keywords
                select Regex.Escape(key))); // escape any special characters in them

/// If any of the bill text keywords is found, return the corresponding provider.
/// Otherwise, return null.
string GetProvider(string billText) 
{
    var match = BillTextRegex.Match(billText);
    if (match.Success) 
        // the Value of the match will be the found substring
        return BillTextToProvider[match.Value];
    else return null;
}

// Your original code now reduces to:

var provider = GetProvider(txtvar.BillText);
// the if is be unnecessary if txtvar.Provider should be null in case it can't be 
// determined
if (provider != null) 
    txtvar.Provider = provider;

Making this case-insensitive is a trivial exercise for the reader.

All that said, this does not even pretend to impose an order on which keywords to look for first - it will find the match that's located earliest in the string. (And then the one that occurs first in the RE.) You do however mention that you're searching through largeish texts; if .NET's RE implementation is at all good this should perform considerably better than 200 naive string searches. (By only making one pass through the string, and maybe a little by merging common prefixes in the compiled RE.)

If ordering is important to you, you might want to consider looking for an implementation of a better string search algorithm than .NET uses. (Like a variant of Boyer-Moore.)

Answer 5

What you want is a Dictionary:

Dictionary<string, string> mapping = new Dictionary<string, string>();
mapping["SWGAS.COM"] = "Southwest Gas";
mapping["foo"] = "bar";
... as many as you need, maybe read from a file ...

Then just:

return mapping[inputString];

Done.

Answer 6

One way of doing it (other answers show very valid options):

void Main()
{
    string input = "georgiapower.com";
    string output = null;

    // an array of string arrays...an array of Tuples would also work, 
    // or a List<T> with any two-member type, etc.
    var search = new []{
        new []{ "SWGAS.COM", "Southwest Gas"},
        new []{ "georgiapower.com", "Georgia Power"},
        new []{ "City of Austin", "City of Austin"}
    };

    for( int i = 0; i < search.Length; i++ ){

        // more complex search logic could go here (e.g. a regex)
        if( input.IndexOf( search[i][0] ) > -1 ){
            output = search[i][1];
            break;
        }
    }

    // (optional) check that a valid result was found.
    if( output == null ){
        throw new InvalidOperationException( "A match was not found." );
    }

    // Assign the result, output it, etc.
    Console.WriteLine( output );
}

The main thing to take out of this exercise is that creating a giant switch or if/else structure is not the best way to do it.

Answer 7

There are several approaches to do this, but for the reason of simplicity, conditional operator may be a choice:

Func<String, bool> contains=x => {
    return txtvar.BillText.IndexOf(x)>-1;
};

txtvar.Provider=
    contains("SWGAS.COM")?"Southwest Gas":
    contains("georgiapower.com")?"Georgia Power":
    contains("City of Austin")?"City of Austin":
    // more statements go here 
    // if none of these matched, txtvar.Provider is assigned to itself
    txtvar.Provider;

Note the result is according to the more preceded condition which is met, so if txtvar.BillText="City of Austin georgiapower.com"; then the result would be "Georgia Power".

Answer 8

you can use dictionary.

Dictionary<string, string> textValue = new Dictionary<string, string>();
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> textKey in textValue)
{
  if(txtvar.BillText.IndexOf(textKey.Key) > -1) 
   return textKey.Value;

}