§ August 8, 2006
A Command Line style string parser (in C#)
Last week I was writing a service that could be run as a console app. I needed to be able to parse a single string into an array like the shell does for command line apps, and the service does for start parameters. I did a little googling, but found only command line arg classes that put command line args into associative array's for easy indexing, which isn't what I was looking for.
The class had basically 2 requirements:
That was a major pain, so I stepped back and rethought my algorithm. this is what I ended up with, which was much simplier, and did exactly what I wanted without a lot of fuss.
So here's my command line parser:
Last week I was writing a service that could be run as a console app. I needed to be able to parse a single string into an array like the shell does for command line apps, and the service does for start parameters. I did a little googling, but found only command line arg classes that put command line args into associative array's for easy indexing, which isn't what I was looking for.
The class had basically 2 requirements:
- It had to be able to split the string on spaces (simple right?)
- It had to escape spaces that were quoted (as well as quotes that were escaped).
That was a major pain, so I stepped back and rethought my algorithm. this is what I ended up with, which was much simplier, and did exactly what I wanted without a lot of fuss.
So here's my command line parser:
public class CommandLineParser { CommandLineParser() { } public static string[] Parse(string str) { if(str == null || !(str.Length > 0)) return new string[0]; int idx = str.Trim().IndexOf(" "); if(idx == -1) return new string[] { str }; int count = str.Length; ArrayList list = new ArrayList(); while(count > 0) { if(str[0] == '"') { int temp = str.IndexOf("\"", 1, str.Length - 1); while(str[temp - 1] == '\\') { temp = str.IndexOf("\"", temp + 1, str.Length - temp - 1); } idx = temp+1; } if(str[0] == '\'') { int temp = str.IndexOf("\'", 1, str.Length - 1); while(str[temp - 1] == '\\') { temp = str.IndexOf("\'", temp + 1, str.Length - temp - 1); } idx = temp+1; } string s = str.Substring(0, idx); int left = count - idx; str = str.Substring(idx, left).Trim(); list.Add(s.Trim('"')); count = str.Length; idx = str.IndexOf(" "); if(idx == -1) { string add = str.Trim('"', ' '); if(add.Length > 0) { list.Add(add); } break; } } return (string[])list.ToArray(typeof(string)); } }
Posted 19 years, 11 months ago on August 8, 2006
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