[IYIaster]

I'm new to C# programming. Started my first program yesterday. I've done some Java programming in the past and wanted to jump into the C# game since it's similar. I'm not a great programming and if you guys were to look at my code you would laugh. The program will get titles from an RSS feed. I already got that part working using xpath. Next it will use those titles to do a search. The data that it receives from that search is what I'm trying to figure out the best way to get. There is a lot data from that search, but what I need is the very first part and it will be in this format, id:980683;. I just need the numbers. Can someone point me in the right direction please. Thanks for your time.

[modi123_1]

It seems pretty straight forward - use the string class's method of "replace" on "id:" and replace it with an empty string.

[Curtis Rutland]

If the ; is part of the data, be sure to Replace that as well.

[IYIaster]

Curtis Rutland, on 06 July 2011 - 11:18 AM, said:

If the ; is part of the data, be sure to Replace that as well.

That is pretty straight forward, but what about all the data after the ; how do I get rid of that?

[modi123_1]

There's data afterwards? That wasn't shown in the example!

[Curtis Rutland]

You can use Split:

var temp = "id:980683;asdfasdf;lkjho;wiuh29083hlio;uwndlf;8hujfn;l98h243lifubh";
var idNum = temp.Split(':', ';').Skip(1).First();
var idNumAlt = temp.Split(':', ';')[1];

idNum and idNumAlt give the same results, they just use a different mechanism. I like the first, but that'll only work on .NET 3.5 and higher.

[codeprada]

Regular expressions would work just fine.

[Curtis Rutland]

Quote

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

--Quoted from this page.

Regex is heavy and complicated for a relatively minor task. I'd avoid using them except for problems that can't be simply solved with splitting/replacing/trimming.