Converting string to double in C#

Question

I have a long string with double-type values separated by # -value1#value2#value3# etc

I splitted it to string table. Then, I want to convert every single element from this table to double type and I get an error. What is wrong with type-conversion here?

string a = "52.8725945#18.69872650000002#50.9028073#14.971600200000012#51.260062#15.5859949000000662452.23862099999999#19.372202799999250800000045#51.7808372#19.474096499999973#";
string[] someArray = a.Split(new char[] { '#' });
for (int i = 0; i < someArray.Length; i++)
{
    Console.WriteLine(someArray[i]); // correct value
    Convert.ToDouble(someArray[i]); // error
}

Answer 1

There are 3 problems.

1) Incorrect decimal separator

Different cultures use different decimal separators (namely , and .).

If you replace . with , it should work as expected:

Console.WriteLine(Convert.ToDouble("52,8725945"));

You can parse your doubles using overloaded method which takes culture as a second parameter. In this case you can use InvariantCulture (What is the invariant culture) e.g. using double.Parse:

double.Parse("52.8725945", System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);

You should also take a look at double.TryParse, you can use it with many options and it is especially useful to check wheter or not your string is a valid double.

2) You have an incorrect double

One of your values is incorrect, because it contains two dots:

15.5859949000000662452.23862099999999

3) Your array has an empty value at the end, which is an incorrect double

You can use overloaded Split which removes empty values:

string[] someArray = a.Split(new char[] { '#' }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);