Parse plain text and generate a csv in android

Question

In my Android project I have a plain text in put from a edittext field like below,

1. Who is superhero?
a) Spiderman
b) Batman
c) Ironman

& etc, multiple questions and answers; this plain text needs to be parsed and each value i.e; questions, each individual answer choices needs to be updated in to individual row cells of a csv file like below,

Any help or inputs on how to achieve this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Simply split your text into lines, every 4 lines you have a question. Simply parse each line and make a csv line by separating the values with a comma

private String parse(String text) {
    // create the header line
    StringBuilder csv = new StringBuilder("Sl No,Question,Option A,Option B,Option C");

    // get every line in an array
    String[] array = text.split("\n");

    // for every 4 lines
    for(int i=0; i<array.length; i = i+4) {
        String question = array[i];
        String optionA = array[i+1];
        String optionB = array[i+2];
        String optionC = array[i+3];
        String questionNo = question.substring(0, question.indexOf(".")).trim();
        String questionText = question.substring(question.indexOf(".")+1).trim();
        String optionAText = optionA.substring(optionA.indexOf(" ")).trim();
        String optionBText = optionB.substring(optionB.indexOf(" ")).trim();
        String optionCText = optionC.substring(optionC.indexOf(" ")).trim();

        // build the corresponding csv line
        String csvLine = questionNo+","+questionText+","+optionAText+","+optionBText+","+optionCText;
        csv.append("\n");
        csv.append(csvLine);
    }
    return csv.toString();
}

Assuming this input text:

    String text =
            "1. Who is superhero?\n" +
            "a) Spiderman\n" +
            "b) Batman\n" +
            "c) Ironman\n" +
            "2. question 2\n" +
            "a) answer 1\n" +
            "b) answer 2\n" +
            "c) answer 3";
    String csv = parse(text);

it returns the following String

Sl No,Question,Option A,Option B,Option C
1,Who is superhero?,Spiderman,Batman,Ironman
2,question 2,answer 1,answer 2,answer 3