I would like to extract a string, within a string, separated by commas

Question

I have the following situation.

Within a string, there will be 2, 3, 4 or even 5 names separated by commas.

Example Leonard Ansin, Jim Jones, Sarah Smith, Barry Stearns

I need to extract each name, separated by commas and place it into a variable.

This doesn't sound to hard, but I am having problems figuring it out.

Can you please help.

Thank you

Leonard

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LEONARD ANSIN

Answer 1

You can use String.Split to do this.

For example, in your case, try:

Dim names = original.Split(New String() {", "}, StringSplitOptions.None)

This splits by comma followed by space (so you don't get a leading space before the second and subsequent names).

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Reed Copsey, Jr. - http://reedcopsey.com
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Answer 2

Leonard,

You can use the String.Split method and specify the comma as to split on. It would be something like:

Dim names() As String = exampleString.Split(","c)

That string array will now contain the values between the commas.

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Please call me Frank :)

Answer 3

Dim input = "Leonard Ansin, Jim Jones, Sarah Smith, Barry Stearns"

Dim names As String() = input.Split(","C).ToArray()
For Each name  In names
	Console.WriteLine(name)
Next

Answer 4

There should be a lot of examples of this in the forums already.

You will want to use the Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.TextFieldParser to read the lines of the file into an array of strings.  Then you can add those arrays to a list or use them to populate a data table or store them in some other way.

Please check the sample in the documentation and search these forums for TextFieldParser.  Feel free to post back with your code if you run into a specific problem, or if there is something in the documentation and related threads that you don't understand.

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Reed Kimble - "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all"

Answer 5

Thank you

This was great.

Please keep this question open for a few days, until I extract data from the table.

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LEONARD ANSIN

Answer 6

Hello,

The following may very well be more than you want. The variable MyNames is our string to work with which I noticed there are spaces after each comma so to make the split work properly Replace method is used. PeopleList creates a List(Of Person) where Person class allows if needed to work with the data i.e. locate, sort, add, edit remove in a English format.

Class

Public Class Person
    Public Property FirstName As String
    Public Property LastName As String
    Public Sub New()
    End Sub
    Public Overrides Function ToString() As String
        Return FirstName & " " & LastName
    End Function
End Class

Example for obtaining data. Please note I change the order of names to demo sorting the data.

Dim MyNames As String = "Barry Stearns, Jim Jones, Sarah Smith, Leonard Ansin"
Dim PeopleList =
    (
        From T In MyNames.Replace(", ", ",").Split(","c)
        Let Item = T.TrimStart.Split(" "c)
        Select New Person With
               {
                   .FirstName = Item(0),
                   .LastName = Item(1)
               }
        ).OrderBy(
        Function(p) p.LastName
    ).ToList
For Each p In PeopleList
    Console.WriteLine("[{0}] ", p.ToString)
Next

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Answer 7

Thank you for your efforts in assisting me.

The problem has now been solved.

Best regards'

Leonard

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LEONARD ANSIN