Convert string representation of an array into an array - C#

It's json-array, use http://james.newtonking.com/json for this

 public static T JsonDeserialize<T> (string jsonString)
 {
     DataContractJsonSerializer ser = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(T));
     MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(jsonString));
     T obj = (T)ser.ReadObject(ms);
     return obj;
 }

This is just a possible way:

        var str = "['some value','another value','value three']";

        // eliminate '[' and ']'
        str = str.Substring(1, str.Length - 2);

        // remove '
        str = str.Replace("'", string.Empty);

        // split it in a array
        var items = str.Split(',');

For further information about splitting strings, you can use die MSDN

Hope it helps.

Well, if you can assume that each item will not have a comma, then it could be as straight forward as:

const string value = "['some value','another value','value three']";

var array =
   value
   .Substring(1, value.Length - 2)
   .Split(',')
   .Select(item => item.Substring(1, item.Length - 2))
   .ToArray();

If you can't assume there are no commas, but can assume there are no sequences of apostrophe-comma-apostrophe, then you could do this:

const string value = "['some value','another value','value three']";

var array =
   value
   .Substring(1, value.Length - 2)
   .Split(new[] { "','" }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
   .ToArray();

array[0] = array[0].Substring(1, array[0].Length - 1);
int x = array.Length - 1;
array[x] = array[x].Substring(0, array[x].Length - 1);

Otherwise your options would be:

• 'manually' loop through the data, keeping track of what's inside of each pair of apostrophes
• using a regex, though I'm not sure how well that would work
• as Igor has said, use a JSON deserializer, if this is indeed something that could be deserialized that way

string s = "['some value','another value','value three']";
s=s.Replace("[", "").Replace("'","").Replace ("]","") ; 
List<string> names = s.Split(',').ToList<string>();