How to break a string in lines

Question

I'm confused with what is the correct way to break lines.

I read somewhere that windows use \r\n to break lines, but this two codes produce the same

regex.split(sometext, "\r\n");
regex.split(sometext, "\n");

What it is the correct way?, these expressions always produce the same?

Answer 1

Use

var myArray = sometext.Split(Environment.NewLine);

Environment.NewLine will pick the correct one for your operating system. This will fail if the data was created on a different system. Something that might work on all systems, but have some unintended consequences is

var myArray = sometext.Split(new[] {'\r', '\n'}, 
    StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

Some possible worrisome things is that it will remove all empty lines and split on carriage returns.

Answer 2

If you want to support new-line characters for every platform (e.g. you need to parse input files, created under Linux/Windows/Mac in your ASP.NET web-site) and you do not carry about empty strings, I suggest to use this method instead:

myString.Split(new char[] { '\n', '\r' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)

This will return

["one","two","three"]

for input string

"one\r\ntwo\n\n\nthree"

Update: If you need to carry about empty lines, you can use

myString.Replace("\r\n", "\n").Split("\n")

This should work for both "\r\n" and "\n" EOL charracter files.

Answer 3

You can use Environment.NewLine to make sure you get the correct one.