How do I properly extract a string from the clipboard

Question

So i'm trying to get the links from the clipboard, I manage to work it out just fine if I have one but I changed my method a bit because let's say I have more than 1 link saved in my clipboard. I get this error

Cannot convert type 'char' to 'string'

I dont see why, everything returns a string or a bool. What is causing this error and how do I resolve it?

if (Clipboard.ContainsText(TextDataFormat.Text))
{
    string clipboardText = Clipboard.GetText(TextDataFormat.Text);
    foreach (string link in clipboardText)
    {
        if (Uri.TryCreate(link, UriKind.Absolute, out var uri))
        {
            rtbLinks.AppendText(uri + "\n");
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

A foreach-loop loops through a collection or an array. In your case, you are using the string as the collection/array. That is somewhat possible; imagine a string as an array of type char.

You could use

foreach (char link in clipboardText)
{
    if (Uri.TryCreate(link, UriKind.Absolute, out var uri))
    {
        rtbLinks.AppendText(uri + "\n");
    }
}

That would only loop through each character of the string, though, and would not really solve your problem.

Have a look at this for more information on the foreach-loop.

What you really need is an array of type string, where you store the links. I imagine you have those strings split by a delimiter (like "|") in your clipboard, so you could modify your code like this:

if (Clipboard.ContainsText(TextDataFormat.Text)) {
    string[] clipboardText = Clipboard.GetText(TextDataFormat.Text).Split('|');
    foreach (string link in clipboardText) {
        if (Uri.TryCreate(link, UriKind.Absolute, out var uri)) {
            rtbLinks.AppendText(uri + "\n");
        }
    }
}

If you have, eg "https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com|https://stackoverflow.com" in your clipboard, it will split the links into the array of string and you can work with those.

Without a delimiter, things might get a bit more tricky. You would then have to manually split those links into the string array first, and loop through that array afterwards.