Home >Backend Development >C++ >How Can I Use Regex in C# to Match Whole Words Only?

How Can I Use Regex in C# to Match Whole Words Only?

Mary-Kate Olsen
Mary-Kate OlsenOriginal
2025-01-22 20:02:10634browse

How Can I Use Regex in C# to Match Whole Words Only?

Use regular expression to match complete words in C#

In programming, it is often necessary to extract specific words from a string. In C#, regular expressions (Regex) provide a powerful tool for such tasks. However, matching whole words can be tricky if you don't think about it.

Consider the following scenario: You have a clothing store website and you want to match words related to clothing, such as "shoes", "shirt" or "pants". You wrote a regular expression:

<code>string keywords = "(shoes|shirt|pants)";</code>

And try to find these words in the content string using the following code:

<code>Regex.Match(content, keywords + "\s+",
  RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Success</code>

However, this regex incorrectly matches "participants" because it contains "pants" as a substring. To match only exact words, be sure to use word separators, represented by \b.

The modified regular expression becomes:

<code>\b(shoes|shirt|pants)\b</code>

By adding word separators, the regex now expects matched words to be preceded and followed by spaces, punctuation, or the beginning/end of a string. In code, this modified expression would be:

<code>Regex.Match(content, @"\b(shoes|shirt|pants)\b");</code>

With this modification, the regex will only match the literal words "shoes", "shirt" and "pants" in the content string.

The above is the detailed content of How Can I Use Regex in C# to Match Whole Words Only?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!

Statement:
The content of this article is voluntarily contributed by netizens, and the copyright belongs to the original author. This site does not assume corresponding legal responsibility. If you find any content suspected of plagiarism or infringement, please contact admin@php.cn