CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.netregex
user99999991
user99999991

Reputation: 1421

Regex.Matches isn't capturing the whole groups I need

(-[a-zA-Z]+=?)+(([^\s]+)|(\s+((["'])(?:(?=(\\?))\2.)*?\6)))

I have a bunch of command line arguments.

-arg1 -arg2 -arg3=500 -arg4=-250,200,50.0 -arg5 "Hello World" -arg6 "[I don't know whats going on /here/]"

I'm not particularly good at regex, and was using regexr.com to verify my results. Regex.Matches with the expression from this site usually works copy and pasted out no problem. This time its not.

The results of using that command line string is as follows:

Count = 6
[0]: "-arg1"
[1]: "-arg2"
[2]: "-arg3=500"
[3]: "-arg4=-250,200,50.0"
[4]: "-arg5"
[5]: "-arg6"

And this is looping through Regex.Matches and each Captures

I can't figure out why the quotes won't become part of the match. Is it maybe a whitespace issue with the |(\s+((["'] part?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 67

Answers (1)

Sam
Sam

Reputation: 20486

Update:

I tweaked this per your comment. I pulled the optional space (\s*) into a non capturing group with a space OR an equal sign. You'll also see I moved the quotation capture first in the alternation since \S+ would start matching "foo and we don't want that.

(-\w+)(?:=|\s)?("[^"]*"|\S+)?

I cleaned this up a bit in general, let me know if there's any missing functionality from the original expression you wrote:

(-\w+)\s*((?:=\S+)|"[^"]*")?

Demo

There's a couple things breaking your original expression, including:

  • freaking hard to read, which results in confusion when using \2 or \6 references
  • no \d capture for the argument key (-[a-zA-Z]+=?)
  • way over-complicated logic for the capturing quoted values

Upvotes: 3

Related Questions