Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
More information on Linq can be found online in MSDN at
Linq and regular expressions
Linq, of course, need not work in isolation. It can, for example, be combined with
regular expressions to extract specific string patterns from a larger string that converts
the matched results into a traversable array. This can be especially useful in processing
comma-separated value files (CSV files), for example, where data is formatted inside
a text file, each entry being separated by a comma character. Both Linq and regular
expressions can be used to read each value into a unique array element very quickly
and easily. For example, consider an RTS game where human names must be
generated for new units. The names themselves are stored in a CSV format and are
divided into two groups: male and female. On generating a character, it can be either
male or female, and an appropriate name must be assigned to them from the CSV data,
as shown in the following code sample 6-24:
01 //Generate female name
02 //Regular Expression Search Pattern
03 //Find all names prefixed with 'female:' but do not include the
prefix in the results
04 string search = @"(?<=\bfemale:)\w+\b";
05
06 //CSV Data - names of characters
07 string CSVData =
"male:john,male:tom,male:bob,female:betty,female:jessica,male:dirk
";
08
09 //Retrieve all prefixed with 'female'. Don't include prefix
10 string[] FemaleNames = (from Match m in Regex.Matches(CSVData,
search)
11 select m.Groups[0].Value).ToArray();
12
13 //Print all female names in results
14 foreach(string S in FemaleNames)
15 Debug.Log (S);
16
17 //Now pick a random female name from collection
18 string RandomFemaleName = FemaleNames[Random.Range(0,
FemaleNames.Length)];
