construct array out of string

[monalin]

Well, that is just the method to get the value. You can use it to create a dictionary.

Would be counter productive to create a dictionary like this because he would need to know the all the values ahead of time. I suppose you could use the dictionary as a caching mechanism though and just save the result in a dictionary and only resort to the GetValue() if no entry is in the dictionary... Something like this.

public String GetCachedValue(String name)
{
      if(!dictionary.ContainsKey(name))
          dictionary[name] = GetValue(name);
      return dictionary[name];
}

and why not something like this?

In the original problem it was stated that the fields present in the string would be different depending on what he was trying to do. So we needed a solution that was a little more generic and worked with any string of name/value pairs.