Assuming that your "repeating pattern" is always repeated in full, like your sample data suggests, you could just think of your array as a bunch of repeating arrays of equal length. Meaning:
[1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3] is the same as [1, 2, 3] repeated three times.
This means that you could just check to see if every x value in the array is equal to each other. So:
array[0] == array[3] == array[6]
array[1] == array[4] == array[7]
array[2] == array[5] == array[8]
Since you don't know the length of the repeated pattern, you'd just have to try all possible lengths until you found a pattern or ran out of possible shorter arrays. I'm sure there are optimizations that can be added to the following, but it works (assuming I understand the question correctly, of course).
static void Main(string[] args)
{
int[] array1 = {12, 4, 5, 7, 1, 2};
int[] array2 = {1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3};
int[] array3 = {1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1 };
int[] array4 = {1, 2, 4, 12, 13, 1, 2, 4, 12, 13 };
Console.WriteLine(splitMethod(array1));
Console.WriteLine(splitMethod(array2));
Console.WriteLine(splitMethod(array3));
Console.WriteLine(splitMethod(array4));
Console.ReadLine();
}
static bool splitMethod(int[] array)
{
for(int patternLength = 1; patternLength <= array.Length/2; patternLength++)
{
// if the pattern length doesn't divide the length of the array evenly,
// then we can't have a pattern of that length.
if(array.Length % patternLength != 0)
{
continue;
}
// To check if every x value is equal, we need to give a start index
// To begin our comparisons at.
// We'll start at index 0 and check it against 0+x, 0+x+x, 0+x+x+x, etc.
// Then we'll use index 1 and check it against 1+x, 1+x+x, 1+x+x+x, etc.
// Then... etc.
// If we find that every x value starting at a given start index aren't
// equal, then we'll continue to the next pattern length.
// We'll assume our patternLength will produce a pattern and let
// our test determines if we don't have a pattern.
bool foundPattern = true;
for (int startIndex = 0; startIndex < patternLength; startIndex++)
{
if (!everyXValueEqual(array, patternLength, startIndex))
{
foundPattern = false;
break;
}
}
if (foundPattern)
{
return true;
}
}
return false;
}
static bool everyXValueEqual(int[] array, int x, int startIndex)
{
// if the next index we want to compare against is outside the bounds of the array
// we've done all the matching we can for a pattern of length x.
if (startIndex+x > array.Length-1)
return true;
// if the value at starIndex equals the value at startIndex + x
// we can go on to test values at startIndex + x and startIndex + x + x
if (array[startIndex] == array[startIndex + x])
return everyXValueEqual(array, x, startIndex + x);
return false;
}
