reading two integers in one line using C#

Question

i know how to make a console read two integers but each integer by it self like this

int a = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine()); int b = int.Parse(Console.ReadLine()); 

if i entered two numbers, i.e (1 2), the value (1 2), cant be parse to integers what i want is if i entered 1 2 then it will take it as two integers

Answer 1

One option would be to accept a single line of input as a string and then process it. For example:

//Read line, and split it by whitespace into an array of strings string[] tokens = Console.ReadLine().Split();  //Parse element 0 int a = int.Parse(tokens[0]);  //Parse element 1 int b = int.Parse(tokens[1]); 

One issue with this approach is that it will fail (by throwing an IndexOutOfRangeException/ FormatException) if the user does not enter the text in the expected format. If this is possible, you will have to validate the input.

For example, with regular expressions:

string line = Console.ReadLine();  // If the line consists of a sequence of digits, followed by whitespaces, // followed by another sequence of digits (doesn't handle overflows) if(new Regex(@"^\d+\s+\d+$").IsMatch(line)) {    ...   // Valid: process input } else {    ...   // Invalid input } 

Alternatively:

1. Verify that the input splits into exactly 2 strings.
2. Use int.TryParse to attempt to parse the strings into numbers.

Answer 2

You need something like (no error-checking code)

var ints = Console             .ReadLine()             .Split()             .Select(int.Parse); 

This reads a line, splits on whitespace and parses the split strings as integers. Of course in reality you would want to check if the entered strings are in fact valid integers (int.TryParse).