Removing empty lines from string array

Question

I'm trying to get a string array with single words from a textfile. However the array is filled with some empty lines. Any Idea how I can make a string array without those empty lines?

WebClient client = new WebClient();
Stream stream = client.OpenRead("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Quackmatic/f8deb2b64dd07ea0985d/raw/macbeth.txt");
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);
string[] content = reader.ReadToEnd().Split('?', '!', ' ', '\n', '[', ']', '.');

for (int i = 0; i < 5; i++)
{
    Console.WriteLine(content[i]);
}
Console.ReadLine();

Farhad Jabiyev · Accepted Answer · 2015-03-08 19:36:00Z

6

You can try Split() method overload which takes StringSplitOptions as a second parameter with the value RemoveEmptyEntries. Then the return value does not include array elements that contain an empty string.

var result = reader.ReadToEnd()
                   .Split(new[] {'?', '!', ' ', '\n', '[', ']', '.'} , StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

By the way, after this you can call Trim() for all elements, because RemoveEmptyEntries doesn't consider the string " " empty. So you can add this to your code, if you want to discard empty strings:

var result = reader.ReadToEnd()
                   .Split(new[] {'?', '!', ' ', '\n', '[', ']', '.'} , StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
                   .Where(x => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(x.Trim())
                   .ToArray();

edited Mar 8, 2015 at 19:36

answered Mar 8, 2015 at 19:16

Farhad Jabiyev

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Comments

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 12:06:25Z

0

As you are calling Split, you can do it with the options as detailed in other answer. If you were not however and wanted to remove empty lines from an array using linq:

content = content.Where(s => s != "").ToArray();

edited May 23, 2017 at 12:06

CommunityBot

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answered Mar 8, 2015 at 19:21

weston

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