I have what seemed at first to be a trivial problem but turned out to become something I can't figure out how to easily solve. I need to be able to store lists of items in a string. Then those items in turn can be a list, or some other value that may contain my separator character. I have two different methods that unpack the two different cases but I realized I need to encode the contained value from any separator characters used with string.Split.

To illustrate the problem:

string[] nested = { "mary;john;carl", "dog;cat;fish", "plainValue" }
string list = string.Join(";", nested);
string[] unnested = list.Split(';'); // EEK! returns 7 items, expected 3!

This would produce a list "mary;john;carl;dog;cat;fish;plainValue", a value I can't split to get the three original nested strings from. Indeed, instead of the three original strings, I'd get 7 strings on split and this approach thus doesn't work at all.

What I want is to allow the values in my string to be encoded so I can unpack/split the contents just the way before I packed/join them. I assume I might need to go away from string.Split and string.Join and that is perfectly fine. I might just have overlooked some useful class or method.

• How can I allow any string values to be packed / unpacked into lists?
  I prefer neat, simple solutions over bulky if possible.

For the curious mind, I am making extensions for PlayerPrefs in Unity3D, and I can only work with ints, floats and strings. Thus I chose strings to be my data carrier. This is why I am making this nested list of strings.