Is there a way to use multiple StringSplitOptions in String.Split()?

July 12, 2022

I would like to split a string by a delimiter ";" and apply both StringSplitOptions.TrimEntries and StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries. I tried using an array of StringSplitOptions like

// myString already defined elsewhere    
StringSplitOptions[] options = { StringSplitOptions.TrimEntries, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries };
string[] strs = myString.Split(';', options);

but this doesn’t compile. I know I can remove whitespaces later with Trim(), but would prefer a clean single-statement solution and it seems like you should be able to use multiple (both) options. In the page for the StringSplitOptions enum , it mentions

If RemoveEmptyEntries and TrimEntries are specified together, then substrings that consist only of white-space characters are also removed from the result.

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Neither the rest of the page nor the page for the String.Split() method give any indication of how they could be specified together.

I may be missing something simple since I’m fairly new to and self-taught in C#. Excuse me if this post is formatted poorly or is a duplicate question, first post on Stack Overflow. I tried searching for this issue and didn’t see any results. Thanks in advance for any guidance you can give?

>Solution :

StringSplitOptions enum is marked with [Flags] attribute, and you can combine multiple Flags by | operator.

using System;
                    
public class Program
{
    public static void Main()
    {
        var myString = " ; some test     ; here; for;   test   ;";
        string[] strs = myString.Split(';', StringSplitOptions.TrimEntries | StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);        
        foreach (var str in strs)
        {
          Console.WriteLine($"-{str}-");
        }
    }
}

Output:

-some test-
-here-
-for-
-test-

StringSplitOptions splitOptions = StringSplitOptions.TrimEntries | StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries;
string[] strs = myString.Split(';', splitOptions);