Substring with Multiple Arguments - asp.net

Question

I have a dropdownlist that has the value of two columns in it... One column is a number ranging from 5 characters long to 8 characters long then a space then the '|' character and another space, followed by a Description for the set of numbers.
An example:
12345678 | Description of Product
In order to pull the items for the dropdownlist into my database I need a to utilize a substring to pull the sequence of numbers out only.
Is it possible to write a substring to pull multiple character lengths? (Sometimes it may be 6 numbers, sometimes 5 numbers, sometimes 8, it would depend on what the user selected from the dropdownlist.)

Answer 1

Use a regular expression for this.
Assuming the number is at the start of the string, you can use the following:
^[0-9]+
Usage:
var theNumbers = RegEx.Match(myDropdownValue, "^[0-9]+").Value;
You could also use string.Split to get the parts separated by | if you know the first part is what you need and will always be numeric:
var theNumbers = myDropdownValue.Split("| ".ToCharArray(),
StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)[0];
Either of these approaches will result in a string. You can use int.Parse on the result in order to get an integer from it.

Answer 2

This is how I would do it
string str = "12345678 | Description of Product";
int delimiter;
delimiter = str.IndexOf("|") - 1;
string ID =str.substring(0, delimiter);
string desc = str.substring(delimiter + 1, str.length - 1);

Answer 3

Try using a regex to pull out the first match of a sequence of numbers of any length. The regex will look something like "^\d+" - starts with any number of decimal digits.

Answer 4

Instead of using substring, you should use Split function.
var words = phrase.Split(new string[] {" | "},
StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
var number = word[0];