Best way to select a String within a String

Question

I have this string;

<div class="flip-entry-title">System~1584~CommandName-e.dat</div></div><div class="flip-entry-last-modified"><div>18 Αυγ</div></div></div><div class="flip-entry" id="entry-0B4jdixTeku1LMlpNdEtOSmhxWWM"

What is the best efficient way to pick System~560~Charcreategrp.dat and entry-0B4jdixTeku1LMlpNdEtOSmhxWWM

I know I can use Regex.split and substring(x, y) but I want to know if theres a class or a method in C# that will do this job for me.

If it's always going to be HTML then HTMLAgilityPack may be of interest - otherwise Regex — Liath, Aug 19 '14 at 10:35
Related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — Caramiriel, Aug 19 '14 at 10:53
Unfortunately, solved with Regex + substring, thanks everyone for your help — user3789587, Aug 19 '14 at 11:41
@user3789587 [You can't parse XML with regex!](http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/1808494) — Aron, Aug 20 '14 at 01:23

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 19 '14 at 10:37

1

If it is always XML (or HTML) you could parse it

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.LoadXml(myStr);

And then use XPath or Linq to fetch what you need from doc.

answered Aug 19 '14 at 10:37

ZoolWay

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ekostadinov · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-19T11:57:00.443

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If they are not good for your case take a look at these:

Can you explain why Regex and substring() are no option?

Update: Ok, I understand. As you know working with String may be slow - you can try StringBuilder (way faster), but 2-400 operations can be high number, when you append/join or split/search.

split and substring make the code unreadable and too complex,

Even if you think so - you can always create proper comments...self-documenting/explanatory code is very helpful and is one of the best-practices.

edited Aug 19 '14 at 11:57

answered Aug 19 '14 at 10:42

ekostadinov

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split and substring make the code unreadable and too complex, since i have an unknown number of strings 200 - 400 that I have to process – user3789587 Aug 19 '14 at 10:53
Also, I get those HTML string from the web, their order/contents may change at any time so I need a more generic aproach – user3789587 Aug 19 '14 at 10:55

Best way to select a String within a String

2 Answers2