Filtering out information in a folder name

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I am new to C# and coding in general and have come across a problem that I could use some help with. There is a project I am working on where I have to loop through a folder structure that contains many subfolders and files in them. This is the easy part. Where I am having the issue is that I need to pull some information out of the current or previous folder name that the file resides in. I am not sure how to filter out and verify the information I need in these folder names.

ex
C:\Project\2011\43\1111$11$1 Word Document\687\filename.pdf
C:\Project\2011\55\1234-54-5\1234-54-5 Excel Document\filename.pdf
C:\Project\2011\23\5555$44$5\5555$44$5 A333XP Another Type of Document\filename.pdf

The information I need to gather from these is the 5555$44$5 (can also be in 1234-54-5 format) and the information after such as word document, excel document, etc. However I do not need the A333XP information that appears in some of the folder names. There is at least some standardization in in that the elements that I need have a structure.

5555$44$5 (4 numbers, $ or -, 2 numbers, $ or -, 1 number)
A333XP (1 letter, 3 numbers, 2 letters)

Once I pull out those I need to gather the rest of the name for the last field of information I need.

My question is how would I go about taking this on to get the fields that I need separated?

Posted 7-Nov-13 3:48am

trkghost

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ridoy 7-Nov-13 9:50am

use regex.

2 solutions

Solution 2

If the element you need is always the first word of the folder name then you can get the string that represents that text and split it by the empty character, that will give you an array with every word separated. If you want to recognize an specific format then you can use regular expressions, C# implements this in the namespace RegExp.

Posted 7-Nov-13 4:24am

Arnaldo P. Castaño

Comments

trkghost 7-Nov-13 15:45pm

Think Regular expressions is going to be the best way to do this since the information I am needing to gather is in a few different formats. Thanks for the help!

Arnaldo P. Castaño 11-Nov-13 13:40pm

ok, anything I can do to help.

trkghost 11-Nov-13 14:14pm

Thanks. I have a couple of the expressions built so far to find the information I am looking for.

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phil.o · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-07T04:05:00

I would go for a regular expression to filter out the directory-names parts:

C#

using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

Regex r = new Regex(@"^(?<Part1>[\d]{4}[-$][\d]{2}[-$][\d]{1})\s(?<Part2>[\w][\d]{3}[\w]{2})\.*$", RegexOptions.Compiled | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
string example = "5555$44$5 A333XP Another Type of Document";
Match m = r.Match(example);
string part1 = m.Groups["Part1"]; // part1 == "5555$44$5"
string part2 = m.Groups["Part2"]; // part2 == "A333XP"

You can use Expresso[^] if you want to learn/build complex regular expressions.

Hope this helps.