How to split Environment.NewLine?

Question

I want to count the number of lines in a text.

Below works fine:

int numLines = copyText.Split('\n').Length - 1;

However, I've been using System.Environment.NewLine in the whole of my code and when I try:

 int numLines = copyText.Split(System.Environment.NewLine).Length - 1;

It keeps bringing up a red wriggly line underneath stating cannot convert string to char. Been trying to rectify this but no luck. Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

To split on newline, you can use the following:

copyText.Split(new string[] { System.Environment.NewLine },
               StringSplitOptions.None).Length - 1;

Here is a reference to the overload which uses a string array.

Note that System.Environment.NewLine is of type System.String. On Windows it is a 2 character string: \r\n and on Unix systems it is a 1 character string: \n. This is why you cannot use it as a char.

Wikipedia has a good article on newlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline

I recommend reading it.

Answer 2

As @Jesse Good noted, there are several kinds of newlines that might appear in a string. A regular expression can be used to match the various kinds of newlines that might appear in a string:

var text = "line 1\rline 2\nline 3\r\nline 4";

/* A regular expression that matches Windows newlines (\r\n),
    Unix/Linux/OS X newlines (\n), and old-style MacOS newlines (\r).
    The regex is processed left-to-right, so the Windows newlines
    are matched first, then the Unix newlines and finally the
    MacOS newlines. */
var newLinesRegex = new Regex(@"\r\n|\n|\r", RegexOptions.Singleline);
var lines = newLinesRegex.Split(text);

Console.WriteLine("Found {0} lines.", lines.Length);

foreach (var line in lines)
  Console.WriteLine(line);

Output:

Found 4 lines.
line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4