How to find a string between two begin and end strings in C#

How to parse a webpage in C#? Simple text parsing in C# using GetStringInBetween, GetStringBetween

One common requirement especially when doing screen scrapping is to find strings contained between html tags, or other strings. Regular Expressions provide a powerful way to do so, but are initially intimidating for a beginner programmer. Here is an alternative solution to finding a string between two other strings that uses simple string manipulation in C#, without Regular Expressions:

string myString = "<span>Senthil</span><span>Kumar</span>";

string[] result = GetStringInBetween("<span>",
"</span>", myString, true, true);

string output = result[0];
string next = result[1];

GetStringInBetween finds the first occurrence of the “begin” and “end” strings, then you can use result[1] to allow you to move ahead down the html document to find the next value.

Here is GetStringInBetween implementation:

public static string[] GetStringInBetween(string strBegin,
string strEnd, string strSource,
bool includeBegin, bool includeEnd)

{

string[] result ={ "", "" };

int iIndexOfBegin = strSource.IndexOf(strBegin);

if (iIndexOfBegin != -1)

{

// include the Begin string if desired
if (includeBegin)

iIndexOfBegin -= strBegin.Length;

strSource = strSource.Substring(iIndexOfBegin + strBegin.Length);

int iEnd = strSource.IndexOf(strEnd);

if (iEnd != -1)

{

// include the End string if desired
if (includeEnd)

iEnd += strEnd.Length;

result[0] = strSource.Substring(0, iEnd);

// advance beyond this segment

if (iEnd + strEnd.Length < strSource.Length)

result[1] = strSource.Substring(iEnd + strEnd.Length);

}

}

else

// stay where we are
result[1] = strSource;

return result;

}

Notice you can choose to include or exclude the beginning and ending search strings in the result.
It's a handy utility that I've been using allot in some screen scrapping projects I've done lately.