CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexvisual-studio-2010
Josh Weston
Josh Weston

Reputation: 1890

Match two whole words in Regex

I am struggling to find a solution for matching two successive whole words using Regular Expression. I have a text box where the user can type in their search criteria, enclosed by quotations for exact matches. The quotes and space (if any) are then replaced by RegEx expressions. Here is an example:

User enters: "Apple Orange"

Converted to: 

\bApple\W+(?:\w+\W+){1,6}?Orange\b

Then, my RegEx match would be based on this converted criteria. The instructions are from www.regular-expressions.info/near.html

Maybe I am going about this entirely the wrong way? I am using visual studio. Any help is appreciated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2218

Answers (1)

CrayonViolent
CrayonViolent

Reputation: 32532

if you want an exact match when a user uses quotes, then you should just remove the quotes and do a straight string comparison (equality, not contains)

update:

Based on comments below, you would just do the same thing as with a single word match:

Single word:

\bApple\b

Double word

\bApple Orange\b

The idea is that the user enters in the search term and you match for exactly that, so you wouldn't be doing pattern matching for the term itself, just the boundaries of it (the \b wrapped around it). There's no reason to touch the search term itself (all that stuff in-between Apple and Orange that you were trying to do) because even the space inbetween the two is part of their search...unless you were wanting to make it a bit flexible..for example, if the user were to enter in "Apple[lots of space here]Orange" to just count that as a single space, then you could do

\bApple\s+Orange\b

..but then you're kind of deviating from the whole "exact match" theme...

Sidenote: You said in your comment that for "CrabApple OrangeCrush" you did not want "Apple Orange" to match. Which is why you use the \b word boundaries. But IMO if it were me, I would allow for that to match. Or at least, offer some kind of option to search for it in that manner.

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions