How to check if lines in string are separated by space? - vb.net

Question

I'm building a program that gets the publisher of the book by scanning its title page and using OCR … since publishers are always at the bottom of the title page I'm thinking that a detecting lines that are separated by space is a solution but I don't know how to test for that. Here is my code:
Dim builder As New StringBuilder()
Dim reader As New StringReader(txtOCR.Text)
Dim iCounter As Integer = 0
While True
Dim line As String = reader.ReadLine()
If line Is Nothing Then Exit While
'i want to put the condition here
End While
txtPublisher.Text = builder.ToString()

Answer 1

Do you mean empty lines? Then you can do this:
Dim bEmpty As Boolean
And then inside the loop:
If line.Trim().Length = 0 Then
bEmpty = True
Else
If bEmpty Then
'...
End If
bEmpty = False
End If

Answer 2

Why not do the following: from the bottom, go up until you find the first non-empty line (no idea how the OCR works … maybe the bottom-most line is always non-empty, in which case this is redundant). In the next step, go up until the first empty line. The text in the middle is the publisher.
You don’t need the StringReader for that:
Dim lines As String() = txtOCR.Text.Split(Environment.NewLine)
Dim bottom As Integer = lines.Length - 1
' Find bottom-most non-empty line.
Do While String.IsNullOrWhitespace(lines(bottom))
bottom -= 1
Loop
' Find empty line above that
Dim top As Integer = bottom - 1
Do Until String.IsNullOrWhitespace(lines(top))
top -= 1
Loop
Dim publisherSubset As New String(bottom - top)()
Array.Copy(lines, top + 1, publisherSubset, 0, bottom - top)
Dim publisher As String = String.Join(Environment.NewLine, publisherSubset)
But to be honest I don’t think this is a particularly good approach. It’s inflexible and doesn’t cope well with unexpected formatting. I’d instead use a regular expression to describe what the publisher string (and its context) looks like. And maybe even that isn’t enough and you have to put some thought into describing the whole page to extrapolate which of the bits is the publisher.

Answer 3

Assuming the publisher is always on the last line and always comes after an empty line. Then perhaps the following?
Dim Lines as New List(Of String)
Dim currentLine as String = ""
Dim previousLine as String = ""
Using reader As StreamReader = New StreamReader(txtOCR.Txt)
currentLine = reader.ReadLine
If String.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(previousLine) then lines.Add(currentLine)
previousLine = currentLine
End Using
txtPublisher.Text = lines.LastOrDefault()
To ignore if the previous line is blank/empty:
Dim Lines as New List(Of String)
Using reader As StreamReader = New StreamReader(txtOCR.Txt)
lines.Add(reader.ReadLine)
End Using
txtPublisher.Text = lines.LastOrDefault()