Get sub-strings from a string that are enclosed using some specified character

Question

Suppose I have a string

Likes (20)

I want to fetch the sub-string enclosed in round brackets (in above case its 20) from this string. This sub-string can change dynamically at runtime. It might be any other number from 0 to infinity. To achieve this my idea is to use a for loop that traverses the whole string and then when a ( is present, it starts adding the characters to another character array and when ) is encountered, it stops adding the characters and returns the array. But I think this might have poor performance. I know very little about regular expressions, so is there a regular expression solution available or any function that can do that in an efficient way?

Answer 1

If you don't fancy using regex you could use Split:

string foo = "Likes (20)";
string[] arr = foo.Split(new char[]{ '(', ')' }, StringSplitOptions.None);
string count = arr[1];

Count = 20

This will work fine regardless of the number in the brackets ()

e.g:

Likes (242535345)

Will give:

242535345

Answer 2

Works also with pure string methods:

string result = "Likes (20)";
int index = result.IndexOf('(');
if (index >= 0)
{
    result = result.Substring(index + 1); // take part behind (
    index = result.IndexOf(')');
    if (index >= 0)
        result = result.Remove(index);    // remove part from )
}

Demo