Splitting strings while taking escaped characters into account

[martin_hughes]

I'm attempting to split a file containing records into a number of substrings. The file spec allows for the normal delimiter (') to be escaped within a record by being prefixed with a question mark. Unless there is some trick to it, I guess this rules out using String.Split() so I wrote the following

static ArrayList DealWithEscapedCharacters(StreamReader inputStream, char segmentTerminator, char escapeCharacter)
{
ArrayList results = new ArrayList();

        string tempBuffer = "";
        char previousChar = ' ';
        char currentChar;

        while (!inputStream.EndOfStream)
        {

            currentChar = (char)inputStream.Read();
            
            if (currentChar == segmentTerminator && previousChar != escapeCharacter)
            {
                tempBuffer += currentChar;
                results.Add(tempBuffer);
                tempBuffer = "";
            }
            else
            {
                tempBuffer += currentChar;
            }

            previousChar = currentChar;
        }

        return results;

    }

This works, and is very quick even on my laptop. However, can anyone suggest a better/more flexible/even more performant approach?

Me: Can you see the "up" arrow? User:Errr...ummm....no. Me: Can you see an arrow that points upwards? User: Oh yes, I see it now! -Excerpt from a support call taken by me, 08/31/2007

[Larantz]

There should be a performance gain in using List<string> as supposed to ArrayList where the strings will be boxed. Larantz-

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