How to split a string and keep the delimiters?

Question

I know that you saw many questions like mine, but I hope mine is a little bit different. I'm making a translator and I wanted to split a text into sentences but when I've written this code:

public static string[] GetSentences(string Text)
{
    if (Text.Contains(". ") || Text.Contains("? ") || Text.Contains("! "))
        return Text.Split(new string[] { ". ", "? ", "! " }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
    else
        return new string[0];
}

It removed the ".", "?", "!". I want to keep them how can I do it.

NOTE: I want to split by ". " dot and a space, "? " question mark and space...

possible duplicate of [How to keep the delimiters of Regex.Split?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15667927/how-to-keep-the-delimiters-of-regex-split) — Sadique, Jun 05 '14 at 12:45
Maybe it's higlhy bad, but you can get the lenght of each member in the array after split and then split by legth. — sdrzymala, Jun 05 '14 at 12:47

H H · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-05T19:50:47.480

Simple, replace them first. I'll use the "|" for readability but you may want to use something more exotic.

// this part could be made a little smarter and more flexible.    
// So, just the basic idea:
Text = Text.Replace(". ", ". |").Replace("? ", "? |").Replace("! ", "! |");

if (Text.Contains("|")) 
    return Text.Split('|', StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

And I wonder about the else return new string[0];, that seems odd. Assuming that when there are no delimiters you want the return the input string, you should just remove the if/else construct.

Ulugbek Umirov · Answer 2 · 2014-06-05T13:07:44.180

2

Regex way:

return Regex.Split(Text, @"(?<=[.?!])\s+");

So you just split the string by empty spaces preceded by one of ., ? and !.

(?<=[.?!])\s+

Regular expression visualization

Demo

edited Jun 05 '14 at 13:07

answered Jun 05 '14 at 12:51

Ulugbek Umirov

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How to split a string and keep the delimiters?

2 Answers2