DelimitedStringParser

Overview

An utility class that converts a delimited string into C# objects. It parser supports all simple types, nullable, and list/set. Map is not supported yet. It requires custom attributes on the class definition.

Why reinventing the wheels?

There are nice libaries for reading CSV files (E.g. CsvHelper, A Fast CSV Reader, File Helpers). If your purpose is to read/write CSV like files, please go with those libraries. This library is created to support the following special requirements:

• You can only access one record as string each time, not entire file.
• Need to support versioned data. See example below.
• Support multi level of objects.

Examples:

Below C# class definition is used to parse delimited string "Field0:Field1:Field2".

[Delimiter(':')]
public class MyClass1
{
    [FieldId(0)]
    public int32 Field0 { get; set; }
    [FieldId(1)]
    public string Field1 { get; set; }
    [FieldId(2)]
    public bool Field2 { get; set; }
}

To use the parser to parse the string "3:abc:false" into the C# object.

MyClass1 myClass1 = DelimitedStringParser<MyClass1>.Parse("3:abc:false");

Below C# class definition is used to parse a versioned data:

Version	Format	Example Data (ver num is at index 0)
1	Field0|Field1|Field2	1|2|abc|1
2	Field0|Field2	2|2|0

[IsVersionedData(true)]
[Delimiter('|')]
public class MyClass2
{
    [FieldId(0)]
    public int Field0 { get; set; }
    [FieldId(1, 1)]
    public string Field1 { get; set; }
    [FieldId(1, 2)]
    [FieldId(2, 1)]
    public bool Field2 { get; set; }
}