In my continued efforts at Roy Osherove’s TDD Kata I’ve been trying to work out how to split a string based on a delimeter which contains more than one character.

My original thinking was that it should be possible to do so like this:

I didn’t realise that splitting the string like that splits on each of the stars individually which means that we end up getting 2 empty values in the result:

If we want to split on '*' then we have to pass it in as a value in a string array:

That way we only get the 1 and 2 which is what we want:

I’d expected there to be an overload which takes in a string and then just splits on that but since there isn’t this isn’t a bad alternative.

Sam Allen has a very interesting article which covers all sorts of way to split different types of strings.