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MrFoxar
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Simple Regex not working as expected

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I am simply trying to find all instances of a word in a richtextbox.text with the following

private void FindAllReferences(RichTextBox rtb, string sText)
        {
            MatchCollection mcReferences;
            mcReferences = Regex.Matches(rtb.Text, sText, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
        }


The above seems like it should work, and the values passed to the method are as expected; i.e. no extra characters or whitespace.

I've tried...

@"\<" + sText + @"\>"

and

@"." + sText + @"."

I am quite new to Regex, so this problem is not surprising, however, I've managed to get some far more complex patterns working properly, like the following

//Build pattern
            StringBuilder stbPattern = new StringBuilder(sFuncName);
            MatchCollection mcFunction;
            stbPattern.Append(iNumParams > 0 ? @"\((\s?\w+\s?,\s?){" + --iNumParams + @"}\s?\w+\s?\)\s?\{" : @"\s?\{");
            mcFunction = Regex.Matches(rtb.Text, stbPattern.ToString());


Works wonderfully in finding a function definition named sFuncName in the text of a scripted language. iNumParams is calculated prior to this segment of code of course.

So I am perplexed.

I just want to match some simple words.

regex
  • asked 4 months ago
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last answered 4 months ago

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To match words, you need to use the word boundary character \b:

@"\b" + sText + @"\b"

  • answered 4 months ago by:

    vulpes
    11603
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MrFoxar
117

Thanks, although I should have mentioned I tried that also, it turns out that it wasn't the problem. I was breaking at the closing '}' to check the value in mcReferences. Since mcReferences went out of scope at that point; it was naturally empty. Using the 'sText' as is, with no additional pattern matching is what I want, since I want it to match all occurences. I want it to match fred, frederick and alfred for 'fred'.

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