Convert string to nullable type (int, double, etc...)

Question

I am attempting to do some data conversion. Unfortunately, much of the data is in strings, where it should be int's or double, etc...

So what I've got is something like:

double? amount = Convert.ToDouble(strAmount);

The problem with this approach is if strAmount is empty, if it's empty I want it to amount to be null, so when I add it into the database the column will be null. So I ended up writing this:

double? amount = null;
if(strAmount.Trim().Length>0)
{
    amount = Convert.ToDouble(strAmount);
}

Now this works fine, but I now have five lines of code instead of one. This makes things a little more difficult to read, especially when I have a large amount of columns to convert.

I thought I'd use an extension to the string class and generic's to pass in the type, this is because it could be a double, or an int, or a long. So I tried this:

public static class GenericExtension
{
    public static Nullable<T> ConvertToNullable<T>(this string s, T type) where T: struct
    {
        if (s.Trim().Length > 0)
        {
            return (Nullable<T>)s;
        }
        return null;
    }
}

But I get the error: Cannot convert type 'string' to 'T?'

Is there a way around this? I am not very familiar with creating methods using generics.

Answer 1

Another thing to keep in mind is that the string itself might be null.

public static Nullable<T> ToNullable<T>(this string s) where T: struct
{
    Nullable<T> result = new Nullable<T>();
    try
    {
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(s) && s.Trim().Length > 0)
        {
            TypeConverter conv = TypeDescriptor.GetConverter(typeof(T));
            result = (T)conv.ConvertFrom(s);
        }
    }
    catch { } 
    return result;
}