Using Regex.Split to remove anything non numeric and splitting on -

Question

I'm not sure why but for some reason The Regex Split method is going over my head. I'm trying to look through tutorials for what I need and can't seem to find anything.

I simply am reading an excel doc and want to format a string such as $145,000-$179,999 to give me two strings. 145000 and 179999. At the same time I'd like to prune a string such as '$180,000-Limit to simply 180000.

var loanLimits = Regex.Matches(Result.Rows[row + 2 + i][column].ToString(), @"\d+");

The above code seems to chop '$145,000-$179,999 up into 4 parts: 145, 000, 179, 999. Any ideas on how to achieve what I'm asking?

mellamokb · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-08 02:03:30Z

2

Regular expressions match exactly character by character (there's no knowledge of the concept of a "number" or a "word" in regular expressions - you have to define that yourself in your expression). The expression you are using, \d+, uses the character class \d, which means any digit 0-9 (and + means match one or more). So in the expression $145,000, notice that the part you are looking for is not just composed of digits; it also includes commas. So the regular expression finds every continuous group of characters that matches your regular expression, which are the four groups of numbers.

There are a couple of ways to approach the problem.

Include , in your regular expression, so (\d|,)+, which means match as many characters in a row that are either a digit or a comma. There will be two matches: 145,000 and 179,999, from which you can further remove the commas with myStr.Replace(",", ""). (DEMO)
Do as you say in the title, and remove all non-numeric characters. So you could use Regex.Replace with the expression [^\d-]+ - which means match anything that is not a digit or a hyphen - and then replace those with "". Then the result would be 145000-179999, which you can split with a simple non-regular-expression split, myStr.Split('-'), to get your two parts. (DEMO)

Note that for your second example ($180,000-Limit), you'll need an extra check to count the number of results returned from Match in the first example, and Split in the second example to determine whether there were two numbers in the range, or only a single number.

edited Dec 8, 2012 at 2:03

answered Dec 8, 2012 at 1:48

mellamokb

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3 Comments

justin peterson Over a year ago

You sir, are awesome. Thank you very much. The little "DEMO" you put in there was incredibly helpful. Thanks for your knowledge!

mellamokb Over a year ago

@JustinPeterson: See note. You'll need some special logic to handle the second case where there is only one number.

justin peterson Over a year ago

Definitely. Well I'm adding these numbers to a list so I'm checking if there is a second value. On that check I simply just add in a default value if the count < 2

COLD TOLD · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-08 01:51:56Z

1

you can try to treat each string separately by spiting it based on - and extraction only numbers from it

 ArrayList mystrings = new ArrayList();
 List<string> myList = Result.Rows[row + 2 + i][column].ToString().Split('-').ToList();

 foreach(var item in myList)
 {

     string result = Regex.Replace(item, @"[^\d]", "");
     mystrings.Add(result);
 }

answered Dec 8, 2012 at 1:51

COLD TOLD

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Comments

Metro Smurf · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-08 02:33:35Z

1

An alternative to using RegEx is to use the built in string and char methods in the DotNet framework. Assuming the input string will always have a single hypen:

string input = "$145,000-$179,999";

var split = input.Split( '-' )
        .Select( x => string.Join( "", x.Where( char.IsLetterOrDigit ) ) )
        .ToList();

string first = split.First(); //145000
string second = split.Last(); //179999

first you split the string using the standard Split method
then you create a new string by selectively taking only Letters or Digits from each item in the collection: x.Where...
then you join the string using the standard Join method
finally, take the first and last item in the collection for your 2 strings.

answered Dec 8, 2012 at 2:33

Metro Smurf

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