Splitting a string into chunks of a certain size

Question

Suppose I had a string:

string str = "1111222233334444"; 

How can I break this string into chunks of some size?

e.g., breaking this into sizes of 4 would return strings:

"1111"
"2222"
"3333"
"4444"

Answer 1

Using regular expressions and Linq:

List<string> groups = (from Match m in Regex.Matches(str, @"\d{4}")
                       select m.Value).ToList();

I find this to be more readable, but it's just a personal opinion. It can also be a one-liner : ).

Answer 2

public static IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> SplitEvery<T>(this IEnumerable<T> values, int n)
{
    var ls = values.Take(n);
    var rs = values.Skip(n);
    return ls.Any() ?
        Cons(ls, SplitEvery(rs, n)) : 
        Enumerable.Empty<IEnumerable<T>>();
}

public static IEnumerable<T> Cons<T>(T x, IEnumerable<T> xs)
{
    yield return x;
    foreach (var xi in xs)
        yield return xi;
}

Answer 3

An important tip if the string that is being chunked needs to support all Unicode characters.

If the string is to support international characters like

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Answer 4

I've slightly build up on João's solution. What I've done differently is in my method you can actually specify whether you want to return the array with remaining characters or whether you want to truncate them if the end characters do not match your required chunk length, I think it's pretty flexible and the code is fairly straight forward:

using System;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace SplitFunction
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string text = "hello, how are you doing today?";
            string[] chunks = SplitIntoChunks(text, 3,false);
            if (chunks != null)
            {
                chunks.ToList().ForEach(e => Console.WriteLine(e));
            }

            Console.ReadKey();
        }

        private static string[] SplitIntoChunks(string text, int chunkSize, bool truncateRemaining)
        {
            string chunk = chunkSize.ToString(); 
            string pattern = truncateRemaining ? ".{" + chunk + "}" : ".{1," + chunk + "}";

            string[] chunks = null;
            if (chunkSize > 0 && !String.IsNullOrEmpty(text))
                chunks = (from Match m in Regex.Matches(text,pattern)select m.Value).ToArray(); 

            return chunks;
        }     
    }
}

Answer 5

Modified (now it accepts any non null string and any positive chunkSize) Konstantin Spirin's solution:

public static IEnumerable<String> Split(String value, int chunkSize) {
  if (null == value)
    throw new ArgumentNullException("value");
  else if (chunkSize <= 0)
    throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("chunkSize", "Chunk size should be positive");

  return Enumerable
    .Range(0, value.Length / chunkSize + ((value.Length % chunkSize) == 0 ? 0 : 1))
    .Select(index => (index + 1) * chunkSize < value.Length 
      ? value.Substring(index * chunkSize, chunkSize)
      : value.Substring(index * chunkSize));
}

Tests:

  String source = @"ABCDEF";

  // "ABCD,EF"
  String test1 = String.Join(",", Split(source, 4));
  // "AB,CD,EF"
  String test2 = String.Join(",", Split(source, 2));
  // "ABCDEF"
  String test3 = String.Join(",", Split(source, 123));

Answer 6

Why not loops? Here's something that would do it quite well:

        string str = "111122223333444455";
        int chunkSize = 4;
        int stringLength = str.Length;
        for (int i = 0; i < stringLength ; i += chunkSize)
        {
            if (i + chunkSize > stringLength) chunkSize = stringLength  - i;
            Console.WriteLine(str.Substring(i, chunkSize));

        }
        Console.ReadLine();

I don't know how you'd deal with case where the string is not factor of 4, but not saying you're idea is not possible, just wondering the motivation for it if a simple for loop does it very well? Obviously the above could be cleaned and even put in as an extension method.

Or as mentioned in comments, you know it's /4 then

str = "1111222233334444";
for (int i = 0; i < stringLength; i += chunkSize) 
  {Console.WriteLine(str.Substring(i, chunkSize));}