CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regex
boss
boss

Reputation: 1606

Exclude special charcters with Regex

I am trying to get version number of my assembly. I use regex for it and here is my pattern.

  $pattern = '\[assembly: AssemblyVersion\("(.*)"\)\]'

It works good but in AssemblyInfo.cs and AssemblyInfo.vb there are some special characters as example

in cs file 

// by using the '*' as shown below:
// [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.*")]
[assembly: AssemblyVersion("3.7.1.0")]

in .vb file

' <Assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.0.*")> 
  <Assembly: AssemblyVersion("3.2.0.0")> 
<Assembly: AssemblyFileVersion("1.0.0.0")>

So I want to exclude // and ' charachters in my pattern. I tried to exclude it with [^//] but it does not work. I tried something else but it did not work either.

And the second question is

in .vb file, there are different starting. 

<Assembly: AssemblyVersion("3.2.0.0")>

and in c# file there are different starting

[assembly: AssemblyVersion("3.7.1.0")]

How i can include also vb version into my pattern?

Where is the problem?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 80

Answers (2)

Valdi_Bo
Valdi_Bo

Reputation: 30971

You want to "exclude" rows which start either with / or '.

Start from setting m (multi-line) flag in you regex. It ensures that ^ matches start of each line (not the whole string).

Then start the regex from:

  • ^ - acting now (in multi-line mode) as a row start marker,
  • (?!\/|') - a negative lookahead group with two variants inside (do not allow that the line starts from either / or '),
  • \s* - an optional sequence of spaces.

and then goes your regex.

So the whole regex should look like below:

^(?!\/|')\s*\[assembly: AssemblyVersion\("(.*)"\)\]

(remember about the m flag).

Negative lookbehind solution mentioned in other answers has such a flaw that even if a row starts from ' or / but has no space thereafter, such a regex will fail.

Upvotes: 1

Oleksandr Muliar
Oleksandr Muliar

Reputation: 179

You can use negative lookbehind if your library supports it

(?<!\/\/\s|\'\s)\[assembly: AssemblyVersion\("(.*)"\)\]

Edit:
For matching different brackets you can just use [variant1|variant2] syntax

(?<!\/\/\s|\'\s)[<\[][Aa]ssembly: AssemblyVersion\("(.*)"\)[>\]]

Upvotes: 1

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