CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#regex
Whatever
Whatever

Reputation: 291

Regex to match a whole string in C#?

I have the following list of produtcs (in a .txt file) :

#ART#NC3FX;price1
#ART#NC3FX;price2
#ART#NC3FX;price3
#ART#NC3FXX;price1
#ART#NC3FXX;price2
#ART#NC3FXX;price3
#ART#NC3FXX;price1
#ART#NC3FXX;price2
#ART#NC3FXX;price3
#ART#NC3FX-HD;price1
#ART#NC3FX-HD;price2
#ART#NC3FX-HD;price3

I'd like to get all the occurrences of the first one (ART#NC3FX).

Using this regular expression

@"(^|\b)#ART#NC3FX(\b|$)";

I retrieve the first three lines, which is fine, but I also get the lines for the reference #ART#NC3FX-HD.

What should I do to prevent this from happening ?

Thanks !

Upvotes: 1

Views: 75

Answers (2)

osanger
osanger

Reputation: 2352

Im not sure if i understand your answer correctly, but why dont you look for the first ; like:

@"^#ART#NC3FX(;|$)"

EDIT: See Avinash's Answer

Upvotes: 1

Wiktor Stribiżew
Wiktor Stribiżew

Reputation: 626747

Your regex finds a match because the - hyphen is not a word character, and you tell the regex engine (with \b) that the character after D should be a non-word character. So, you get a match.

You may use a negative lookahead:

@"\B#ART#NC3FX(?![\w-])"

See regex demo

The \B will match a position at the beginning of the string or a non-word boundary, and (?![\w-]) lookahead will fail a match if the string is followed with a word character or a hyphen. If you test independent strings replace \B with ^ (start of string).

Upvotes: 2

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