Does C# have built-in support for parsing page-number strings?

Question

Does C# have built-in support for parsing strings of page numbers? By page numbers, I mean the format you might enter into a print dialog that's a mixture of comma and dash-delimited.

Something like this:

1,3,5-10,12

What would be really nice is a solution that gave me back some kind of list of all page numbers represented by the string. In the above example, getting a list back like this would be nice:

1,3,5,6,7,8,9,10,12

I just want to avoid rolling my own if there's an easy way to do it.

Answer 1

Should be simple:

foreach( string s in "1,3,5-10,12".Split(',') ) 
{
    // try and get the number
    int num;
    if( int.TryParse( s, out num ) )
    {
        yield return num;
        continue; // skip the rest
    }

    // otherwise we might have a range
    // split on the range delimiter
    string[] subs = s.Split('-');
    int start, end;

    // now see if we can parse a start and end
    if( subs.Length > 1 &&
        int.TryParse(subs[0], out start) &&
        int.TryParse(subs[1], out end) &&
        end >= start )
    {
        // create a range between the two values
        int rangeLength = end - start + 1;
        foreach(int i in Enumerable.Range(start, rangeLength))
        {
            yield return i;
        }
    }
}

Edit: thanks for the fix ;-)

Answer 2

It doesn't have a built-in way to do this, but it would be trivial to do using String.Split.

Simply split on ',' then you have a series of strings that represent either page numbers or ranges. Iterate over that series and do a String.Split of '-'. If there isn't a result, it's a plain page number, so stick it in your list of pages. If there is a result, take the left and right of the '-' as the bounds and use a simple for loop to add each page number to your final list over that range.

Can't take but 5 minutes to do, then maybe another 10 to add in some sanity checks to throw errors when the user tries to input invalid data (like "1-2-3" or something.)