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how to get a value from json with just the index?

Im making an app which needs to loop through steam games.
reading libraryfolder.vbf, i need to loop through and find the first value and save it as a string.
"libraryfolders"
{
"0"
{
"path" "D:\\Steam"
"label" ""
"contentid" "-1387328137801257092942"
"totalsize" "0"
"update_clean_bytes_tally" "42563526469"
"time_last_update_corruption" "1663765126"
"apps"
{
"730" "31892201109"
"4560" "9665045969"
"9200" "22815860246"
"11020" "776953234"
"34010" "11967809445"
"34270" "1583765638"
for example, it would record:
730
4560
9200
11020
34010
34270
Im already using System.Text.JSON in the program, is there any way i could loop through and just get the first value using System.Text.JSON or would i need to do something different as vdf doesnt separate the values with colons or commas?

That is not JSON, that is the KeyValues format developed by Valve. You can read more about the format here:
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/KeyValues
There are existing stackoverflow questions regarding converting a VDF file to JSON, and they mention libraries already developed to help read VDF which can help you out.
VDF to JSON in C#
If you want a very quick and dirty way to read the file without needing any external library I would probably use REGEX and do something like this:
string pattern = "\"apps\"\\s+{\\s+(\"(\\d+)\"\\s+\"\\d+\"\\s+)+\\s+}";
string libraryPath = #"C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\libraryfolders.vdf";
string input = File.ReadAllText(libraryPath);
List<string> indexes = Regex.Matches(input, pattern, RegexOptions.Singleline)
.Cast<Match>().ToList()
.Select(m => m.Groups[2].Captures).ToList()
.SelectMany(c => c.Cast<Capture>())
.Select(c => c.Value).ToList();
foreach(string s in indexes)
{
Debug.WriteLine(s);
}
See the regular expression explaination here:
https://regex101.com/r/bQSt79/1
It basically captures all occurances of "apps" { } in the 0 group, and does a repeating capture of pairs of numbers inbetween the curely brackets in the 1 group, but also captures the left most number in the pair of numbers in the 2 group. Generally repeating captures will only keep the last occurance but because this is C# we can still access the values.
The rest of the code takes each match, the 2nd group of each match, the captures of each group, and the values of those captures, and puts them in a list of strings. Then a foreach will print the value of those strings to log.

Can't replace single whitespace with string.Replace()

I have run into a problem I do not understand. I am reading data from a file and have run into a situation where string.Replace(" ", "<whatever>") on an entry from the file will not replace the occurence of a single whitespace. I cannot help but to feel there is something very basic that I have missed, since the same kind of string declared as a literal works fine.
A typical line from the file (each entry is separated by a tab):
"2016-feb-08 09:54:00" "2016-feb-08 17:28:00" "Short" "227" "5 170,00" "+3,90%" "0,00"
The data from the file is read into an array using File.ReadAllLines().Split(new[] {"\t" }, StringSplitOptions.None);.
I then want to clean up the fifth entry for further processing, and this is when I run into the problem:
entries[4].Replace(" ", string.Empty).Replace("\"", string.Empty); gives "5 170,00"
Regex.Replace(entries[4], #"\s+", string.Empty).Replace("\"", string.Empty); gives "5170,00", which is the result I am looking for.
Running the first Replace() on a literal with a single space works fine, so I am curious if the whitespace inside the strings from the file are different somehow? And while the Regex solution works, I really want to know what my "issue" is.

You can use code like below to check hex values of the character. A normal space is 0x20 which the value showing between the five and the one in the code you posted.
string input = "2016-feb-08 09:54:00 2016-feb-08 17:28:00 Short 227 5 170,00 +3,90% 0,00";
byte[] output = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(input);

How to carriage return C# string without \r\n?

This is my problem.
A user can enter text into a text area in the browser. Which is then emailed out to users.
What I want to know is that how do I handle carriage return? If I enter \r\n for carriage return, the email (which is a plain text email) has actual \r\n in it.
In other words:
On the SQL server end
Case 1:
if I do this before the email gets sent
(notice the line break after line 1)
update emails
set
body='line 1
line 2'
where
id=100
the email goes out correctly
Case 2:
update emails
set
body='line 1'+char(13) + char(10) +'line 2'
where
id=100
This email also goes out correctly
Case 3:
However if I do this
update emails
set
body='line 1 \r\n line 2',
where
id=100
the email would have the actual text \r\n in it.
How do I simulate case 1/2 through c# ?

SQL literals (at least those in SQL Server) do not support such escape sequences (although you can just hit enter within the string literal so that it spans multiple lines). See this answer for some alternatives if writing it as an SQL string is a requirement.
If running the SQL programmatically from C#, use parameters which will handle this just fine:
sqlCommand.CommandText = "update emails set body=#body where id=#id"
sqlCommand.Parameters.AddWithValue("#body", "line 1 \r\n line2");
Note that the handling of the string literal (and conversion of the \r and \n character escape sequences) happens in C# and the value (with CR and LF characters) is passed to SQL.
If the above didn't address the problem, keep reading.
4.10.13 The textarea element:
For historical reasons, the element's value is normalised in three different ways for three different purposes. The raw value is the value as it was originally set. It is not normalized. The API value is the value used in the value IDL attribute. It is normalized so that line breaks use "LF" (U+000A) characters. Finally, there is the form submission value. [Upon form submission the textarea] is normalized so that line breaks use U+000D CARRIAGE RETURN U+000A LINE FEED (CRLF) character pairs, and in addition, if necessary given the element's wrap attribute, additional line breaks are inserted to wrap the text at the given width.
Note that CR and LF represent characters and not the two-character sequence of \ followed by either the r or n characters - this form is often found in string literals. If it appears as such then something is doing the incorrect conversion and putting (or leaving) the \ there. Or, perhaps there is some misguided "add slashes" hack somewhere?
As pointed out, while URL decode is likely wrong, it won't directly do this conversion. However, if the conversion happened previously before being "URL Encoded", then it will (correctly) decode to (incorrect) values.
In either case, it's a bug. So find out where the incorrect data conversion is introduced and fix it (attach a debugger and/or monitor the network traffic for clues) - the required information to isolate where is simply not present in the post.

Use whatever c#'s string replace method is to replace "\\r\\n" with "\r\n" and that should fix it.

How do I prevent a string from appearing in a result string when a set of child strings are concatenated to form the result string?

I have 5 strings, let's call them
EarthString
FireString
WindString
WaterString
HeartString
All of them can have varying length, any of them can be empty, or can be very long (but never null).
These 5 strings are very good friends, and every weekend they are concatenated to form a result string using this c# statement
ResultString = EarthString + FireString + WindString + WaterString + HeartString
Depending on the values of these strings, sometimes (only sometimes), ResultString will contain "Captain Planet" as a substring.
My question is, how do I manipulate each of the 5 strings before they are concatenated, so that when they are combined, "Captain Planet" will never appear as a substring in the resultant string?
The only way I can think of right now is to examine each character in each string, in sequential order, but that seems very tedious. Since each of the 5 good friends strings can be of any length, examining the characters individually will also require some kind of concatenation before we can determine whether any character need to be dropped.
Edit: The resultant string is a filtered version of the 5 strings concatenated together, all the other content remain the same except the "Captain Planet" string is dropped. Yes, i'm looking for a solution which allows the 5 strings to be manipulated before concatenation. (this is actually a simplification of a bigger programming problem i'm encountering). Thanks guys.

If you want to do it pre-concat you could
Assign the start and end of each string a numeric value based on the portion of "CaptainPlanet" they contein. Ex: if Air = "net the big captain" then it would get 3 for a start value and 7 for an end value. to determine if you could concat 2 values safely you would just check to see if the end of the left string + start of the right string were not equal to the total length of "CaptainPlanet". If you had very large strings this would allow you to inspect just the first x and last x characters of the string to compute the start/end value.
This solution doesn't account for short strings like ei air = "Cap" , earth ="tain" and fire="Planet". In that case you would need to have a special case for tokens that are shorter than the length of "CaptainPlanet" For those.

Is there a particular reason you can't just do this?
ResultString.Replace("CaptainPlanet", "x");

If it doesn't matter how many chars will be dropped, you can remove f.e. all 'C' in all strings.

The original answer cleared all of the strings, but as pointed out by J.Steen, there was already a formulation of the expected output. So there we go.
Run elementString.Replace("Captain Planet", "") on every substring.
Now you have to identify all the prefixes / suffixes of "Captain Planet" on each of the substrings, and keep that information so that it can be processed before contatenation. That is, e.g. if the substring ends with "Capt", then you should have an information that "substring contains at the end a prefix of the 4 first letters of 'Captain Planet'". You also have to consider the cases of complete substrings (e.g. one of the strings is "ptain Pla"). The problem also becomes more complex if any of the e.g. prefixes can be recursive or repeated (e.g. "CaptainCap" contains 2 kinds of valid prefixes for "CaptainCaptain", and "apt" can be found at two locations in the resulting string);
You process that information before concatenation so that the result string has the same thing as ResultString.Replace("Captain Planet", ""). Congratulations, you have made your program much more complex than necessary!
But in short, you cannot get both the result that you want (all of the substrings intact except for the combined result output) and do the processing wholly before the concatenation step.

Replacing part of text in richtextbox

I need to compare a value in a string to what user typed in a richtextbox.
For example: if a richtextbox holds string rtbText = "aaaka" and I compare this to another variable string comparable = "ka"(I want it to compare backwards). I want the last 2 letters from rtbText (comparable has only 2 letters) to be replaced with something that was predetermined(doesn't really matter what).
So rtbText should look like this:
rtbText = "aaa(something)"
This doesn't really have to be compared it can just count letters in comparable and based on that it can remove 2 letters from rtbText and replace them with something else.
UPDATE:
Here is what I have:
int coLen = comparable.Length;
comparable = null;
TextPointer caretBack = rtb.CaretPosition.GetPositionAtOffset(coLen, LogicalDirection.Backward);
TextRange rtbText = new TextRange(rtb.CaretPosition, caretBack);
string text = rtbText.Text;
rtbText returns an empty string or I get an error for everything longer than 3 characters. What am I doing wrong?
Let me elaborate it a little bit further. I have a listbox that holds replacements for values that user types in rtb. The values(replacements) are coming from there, meaning that I don't really need to go through the whole text to check values. I just need to check the values right before caret. I am comparing these values to what I have stored in another variable (comparable).
Please let me know if you don't understand something.
I did my best to explain what needs to be done.
Thank you

You could use Regex.Replace.
// this replaces all occurances of "ka" with "Replacement"
Regex replace = new Regex("ka");
string result = replace.Replace("aaaka","Replacemenet");

gumenimeda, I had similar problems few weeks ago. I found my self doing the following (I asume you will have more than one occurance in the RichTextBox that you will need to change), note that I did it for Windows Forms where I have access directly to the Rtf text of the control, not quite sure if it will work well in your scenario:
I find all the occurancies of the string (using IndexOf for example) and store them in a List for example.
Sort the list in descending order (max index goes first, the one before him second, etc)
Start replacing the occurancies directly in the RichTextBox, by removing the characters I don't need and appending the characters I need.
The sorting in step 2 is necessary as we always want to start from the last occurance going up to the first. Starting from the first occurance or any other and going down will have an unpleasant surprise - if the length of the chunk you want to remove and the length of the chunk you want to append are different in length, the string will be modified and all other occurancies will be invalid (for example if the second occurance was in at position 12 and your new string is 2 characters longer than the original, it will become 14th). This is not an issue if we go from the last to the first occurance as the change in string will not affect the next occurance in the list).
Ofcourse I can not be sure that this is the fastest way that can be used to achieve the desired result. It's just what I came up with and what worked for me.
Good luck!