Formatting Text in C# with XNA - user-interface

Question

I'm currently trying to make a TextBox for my GUI with XNA, and I was wondering how could I find tagged text in a string.
For instanceI have this kind of text:
Hey there, I was <r>going to</r> the <b>Mall</b> today!
So the <r> tag would represent red text and the <b> tag would represent blue text.
And I want to know exactly where the red text starts and where the blue text starts so I could render them separately.
Do you have any suggestion what to do about it, and what to use for doing that?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I would suggest doing this with two methods
First, have a method that can take your string and return a collection of string color pairs:
struct StringColorPair {
public string myText; // the text
public Color myColor; // the color of this text
public int myOffset; // characters before this part of the string
// (for positioning in the Draw)
}
public List<StringColorPair> ParseColoredText(string text) {
var list = new List<StringColorPair>();
// Use a regex or other string parsing method to pull out the
// text chunks and their colors and then for each set of those do:
list.Add(
new StringColorPair {
myText = yourParsedSubText,
myColor = yourParsedColor,
myOffset = yourParsedOffset }
);
return list;
}
Then you would need a draw method like this:
public void Draw(List<StringColorPair> pairs) {
foreach(var pair in pairs) {
// Draw the relevant string and color at its needed offset
}
}

Answer 2

Well you could just parse the line and when you reach a set a color property of your text so that it will now render blue but it will have to be a separate render call or else the whole string will turn blue. So if you make a new string when you come upon a tag then set the color property then render that string then that should work.