Minecraft Color code parser

Question

I am trying to make a minecraft color code parser. I take the original text from a textbox and display the resulting text in the rich textbox. The original text would look something like this:

&4Red

Here, &4 means the text after that should be red color.

abc&4Red&fWhite

This text should look like abc in default color (black), "Red" in red, "White" in white.

So how can I parse the text to separate the text to "abc", "&4Red" and "&fWhite" ?

Answer 1

You will have to learn about

1. basic C#
2. Regex
3. LINQ
4. Anonymous types
5. Delegates

but this does the trick :

        var txt = "abc&4Red&fWhite";

        // Add color code Black for first item if no color code is specified
        if (!txt.StartsWith("&"))
            txt = "&0" + txt;

        // Create a substrings list by splitting the text with a regex separator and
        // keep the separators in the list (e.g. ["&0", "abc", "&4", "Red", "&f", "White"])
        string pattern = "(&.)";
        var substrings = Regex.Split(txt, pattern).Where(i => !string.IsNullOrEmpty(i)).ToList();

        // Create 2 lists, one for texts and one for color codes
        var colorCodes = substrings.Where(i => i.StartsWith("&")).ToList();
        var textParts = substrings.Where(i => !i.StartsWith("&")).ToList();

        // Combine the 2 intermediary list into one final result
        var result = textParts.Select((item, index) => new { Text = item, ColorCode = colorCodes[index] }).ToList();