Qfyilyi

I am reading the contents of the CSV to a string as below:

string csvData = string.Empty;



using (var reader = new System.IO.StreamReader(file.OpenReadStream()))

            using (ExcelPackage package = new ExcelPackage())

{

  csvData = reader.ReadToEnd();

  int totalLength = csvData.TrimEnd('|').Split('|').Length;

  string result = null;

  result = csvData.TrimEnd('|').Split('|');



  if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(result[totalLength-1].Replace(",", "").Trim()))

  {

     result = result.Take(result.Count() - 1).ToArray();

  } 



 //do some processing to the result here.

}   

So below is the contents of my sample csvData:

123,a,b,3|456,c,d,5|111,acd,55,c1|,,,,

If you see the sample above it does contain the last empty row as it comes out from CSV. To remove the above empty row I use the above code that I have posted.

This all works fine. But the issue comes when I have more than one empty row as example below:

123,a,b,3|456,c,d,5|111,acd,55,c1|,,,,|,,,,|,,,,

With the above input my code just removes one empty row.

What I want that the result should have no empty rows as below:

123,a,b,3|456,c,d,5|111,acd,55,c1

How can I remove all the empty rows from my array.

Thanks

I advise using CSVHelper. CSV is not such a simple format as it seems.

With CSVHelper you can do this:

using (var csv = new CsvReader(reader))

{

    csv.Configuration.SkipEmptyRecords = true;

    var records = csv.GetRecords<Foo>().ToArray();

}

I'm almost certain the people advising you to CSVHelper or some other tool are correct, but if I were to do it by hand and wasn't absurdly concerned with performance, I'd do it like this:

    private void func()

    {

        string input = "123,a,b,3|456,c,d,5|111,acd,55,c1|,,,,|,,,,|,,,,";



        List<IEnumerable<string>> parsedLines = new List<IEnumerable<string>>();

        foreach (string line in input.TrimEnd('|').Split('|')) //foreach row

            parsedLines.Add(line.Split(',')); //add that as a list of columns

        //select rows that have at least one column with text

        var result = parsedLines.Where(line => line.Any(field => !string.IsNullOrEmpty(field)));

    }

If the goal is to throw away the empty lines BEFORE turning each into a collection of columns, this would work:

        string input = "123,a,b,3|456,c,d,5|111,acd,55,c1|,,,,|,,,,|,,,,";



        var unparsedLines = input.TrimEnd('|').Split('|');

        Regex re = new Regex(@"[^,s]", RegexOptions.Compiled); //search for any char that is not a comma or whitespace

        var result = unparsedLines.Where(o => re.Match(o).Success);

also

s = ",,,|1,2,3|,,,,|,,,|4,56|,,,|,,|,,,,,";

var sprev = s; string res;

while(true)

{

    var snew = Regex.Replace(sprev, "(\||^),{2,}(\||$)","|");

    if(snew == sprev) 

    {

        res = snew.Trim('|');

        break;

    }

    sprev = snew;

}