CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#sqlregex
Russell Nash
Russell Nash

Reputation: 11

How can I treat strings read from SQL as verbatim?

I'm working on a virus / ransomware early warning system for our facility that compares filenames and paths collected from a FileSystemMonitor against a list of regular expressions from an SQL database.

The issue I am having is with C# escaping my regex expressions as they are read from the SQL server.

For example:

SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM Filters ORDER BY Sequence ASC", sqlServer);
SqlDataReader reader = null;
reader = command.ExecuteReader();
filter temp;

while (reader.Read())
{
    temp.dir = @reader["Folder"].ToString().Trim();
    temp.file = @reader["Filter"].ToString().Trim();

    if (!temp.file.Equals(""))
    {
        filterList.Add(temp);
    }
}

If the SQL field Filter contains the valid regex .*\.scr$, temp.filter ends up with the contents .*\\.scr$ which causes the regex match to be missed.

How can I maintain the verbatim state of my regex when read from SQL?

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 635

Answers (1)

Russell Nash
Russell Nash

Reputation: 11

Just wanted to verify that this question has been resolved. Including @ in front of the reader commands is having the desired effect, it's just that I was viewing the strings via the debug environment which was confusing me to think otherwise.

Thanks for everyone's input! Was going to upvote the helpful comments, but it looks like I don't have enough rep yet for that.

Upvotes: 1

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