Here is a little function I needed to use today for spliting a string into an array of strings of a given length rather than by a particular character. I ran into a situation where the database columns I wanted to insert some text into were split over a number of columns eg “DescriptionLine1″, “DescriptionLine2″, “DescriptionLine3″.

Through the magic of extension methods I can split the string into chunks using this code.

            var splitItemDescription = item.Product.Description.SplitIntoChunks(40);

Here is the code for the extension method, written in C#.

        public static string[] SplitIntoChunks(this string toSplit, int chunkSize)
        {
            int stringLength = toSplit.Length;

            int chunksRequired = (int)Math.Ceiling((decimal)stringLength / (decimal)chunkSize);
            var stringArray = new string[chunksRequired];

            int lengthRemaining = stringLength;

            for (int i = 0; i < chunksRequired; i++)
            {
                int lengthToUse = Math.Min(lengthRemaining, chunkSize);
                int startIndex = chunkSize * i;
                stringArray[i] = toSplit.Substring(startIndex, lengthToUse);

                lengthRemaining = lengthRemaining - lengthToUse;
            }

            return stringArray;
        }

The method takes into account strings of which the length is not a factor of the chunk size being used by using what is remaing of the string for the last element of the array.