Ok buddy, here's a solution.
Couple of notes and explanation.
Your text structure can be split up into lines and then again by the slashes into the names of the XML nodes. If you think of the text in this way, you get a list of "lines" broken into a list of
names.
/home
First of all, the first line /home is the root of the XML; we can get rid of it and just create and XDocument object with that name as the root element;
var xDoc = new XDocument("home");
Of course we don't want to hard code things but this is just an example. Now, on to the real work:
/home/room1/
/home/room1/bigroom
etc...
as a List<T> then it will look like this
myList = new List<List<string>>();
... [ add the items ]
myList[0][0] = home
myList[0][1] = room1
myList[1][0] = home
myList[1][1] = room1
myList[1][2] = bigroom
So what we can do to get the above structure is use string.Split() multiple times to break your text first into lines, then into parts of each line, and end up with a multidimensional array-style List<T> that contains List<T> objects, in this case, List<List<string>>.
First let's create the container object:
var possibleNodes = new List<List<string>>();
Next, we should split the lines. Let's call the variable that holds the text, "text".
var splitLines = text
.Split(new string[] { Environment.NewLine }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
.ToList();
This gives us a List but our lines are still not broken up. Let's split them again by the slash (/) character. This is where we build our node names. We can do this in a ForEach and just add to our list of possible nodes:
splitLines.ForEach(l =>
possibleNodes.Add(l
.Split(new char[] { '/' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
.ToList()
)
);
Now, we need to know the DEPTH of the XML. Your text shows that there will be 3 nodes of depth. The node depth is the maximum depth of any one given line of nodes, now stored in the List<List<string>>; we can use the .Max() method to get this:
var nodeDepth = possibleNodes.Max(n => n.Count);
A final setup step: We don't need the first line, because it's just "home" and it will be our root node. We can just create an XDocument object and give it this first line to use as the name of Root:
// Create the root node
XDocument xDoc = new XDocument(new XElement(possibleNodes[0][0]));
// We don't need it anymore
possibleNodes.RemoveAt(0);
Ok, here is where the real work happens, let me explain the rules:
- We need to loop through the outer list, and through each inner list.
- We can use the list indexes to understand which node to add to or which names to ignore
- We need to keep hierarchy proper and not duplicate nodes, and some XLinq helps here
The loops - see the comments for a detailed explanation:
// This gets us looping through the outer nodes
for (var i = 0; i < possibleNodes.Count; i++)
{
// Here we go "sideways" by going through each inner list (each broken down line of the text)
for (var ii = 1; ii < nodeDepth; ii++)
{
// Some lines have more depth than others, so we have to check this here since we are looping on the maximum
if (ii < possibleNodes[i].Count)
{
// Let's see if this node already exists
var existingNode = xDoc.Root.Descendants().FirstOrDefault(d => d.Name.LocalName == (possibleNodes[i][ii]));
// Let's also see if a parent node was created in the previous loop iteration.
// This will tell us whether to add the current node at the root level, or under another node
var parentNode = xDoc.Root.Descendants().FirstOrDefault(d => d.Name.LocalName == (possibleNodes[i][ii - 1]));
// If the current node has already been added, we do nothing (this if statement is not entered into)
// Otherwise, existingNode will be null and that means we need to add the current node
if (null == existingNode)
{
// Now, use parentNode to decide where to add the current node
if (null == parentNode)
{
// The parent node does not exist; therefore, the current node will be added to the root node.
xDoc.Root.Add(new XElement(possibleNodes[i][ii]));
}
else
{
// There IS a parent node for this node!
// Therefore, we must add the current node to the parent node
// (remember, parent node is the previous iteration of the inner for loop on nodeDepth )
var newNode = new XElement(possibleNodes[i][ii]);
parentNode.Add(newNode);
// Add "this is a" text (bonus!) -- only adding this text if the current node is the last one in the list.
if (possibleNodes[i].Count -1 == ii)
{
newNode.Add(new XText("This is a " + newNode.Name.LocalName));
}
}
}
}
}
}
The bonus here is this code will work with any number of nodes and build your XML.
To check it, XDocument has a nifty .ToString() overriden implementation that just spits out all of the XML it is holding, so all you do is this:
Console.Write(xDoc.ToString());
And, you'll get this result:
(Note I added a test node to make sure it works with more than 3 levels)
Below, you will find the entire program with your test text, etc, as a working solution:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Xml.Linq;
namespace XmlFromTextString
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
// This simulates text from a file; note that it must be flush to the left of the screen or else the extra spaces
// add unneeded nodes to the lists that are generated; for simplicity of code, I chose not to implement clean-up of that and just
// ensure that the string literal is not indented from the left of the Visual Studio screen.
string text =
@"/home
/home/room1
/home/room1/subroom
/home/room2
/home/room2/miniroom
/home/room2/test/thetest
/home/room2/bigroom
/home/room2/hugeroom
/home/room3";
var possibleNodes = new List<List<string>>();
var splitLines = text
.Split(new string[] { Environment.NewLine }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
.ToList();
splitLines.ForEach(l =>
possibleNodes.Add(l
.Split(new char[] { '/' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
.ToList()
)
);
var nodeDepth = possibleNodes.Max(n => n.Count);
// Create the root node
XDocument xDoc = new XDocument(new XElement(possibleNodes[0][0]));
// We don't need it anymore
possibleNodes.RemoveAt(0);
// This gets us looping through the outer nodes
for (var i = 0; i < possibleNodes.Count; i++)
{
// Here we go "sideways" by going through each inner list (each broken down line of the text)
for (var ii = 1; ii < nodeDepth; ii++)
{
// Some lines have more depth than others, so we have to check this here since we are looping on the maximum
if (ii < possibleNodes[i].Count)
{
// Let's see if this node already exists
var existingNode = xDoc.Root.Descendants().FirstOrDefault(d => d.Name.LocalName == (possibleNodes[i][ii]));
// Let's also see if a parent node was created in the previous loop iteration.
// This will tell us whether to add the current node at the root level, or under another node
var parentNode = xDoc.Root.Descendants().FirstOrDefault(d => d.Name.LocalName == (possibleNodes[i][ii - 1]));
// If the current node has already been added, we do nothing (this if statement is not entered into)
// Otherwise, existingNode will be null and that means we need to add the current node
if (null == existingNode)
{
// Now, use parentNode to decide where to add the current node
if (null == parentNode)
{
// The parent node does not exist; therefore, the current node will be added to the root node.
xDoc.Root.Add(new XElement(possibleNodes[i][ii]));
}
else
{
// There IS a parent node for this node!
// Therefore, we must add the current node to the parent node
// (remember, parent node is the previous iteration of the inner for loop on nodeDepth )
var newNode = new XElement(possibleNodes[i][ii]);
parentNode.Add(newNode);
// Add "this is a" text (bonus!) -- only adding this text if the current node is the last one in the list.
if (possibleNodes[i].Count -1 == ii)
{
newNode.Add(new XText("This is a " + newNode.Name.LocalName));
// For the same default text on all child-less nodes, us this:
// newNode.Add(new XText("This is default text"));
}
}
}
}
}
}
Console.Write(xDoc.ToString());
Console.ReadKey();
}
}
}
