How to Match Whole Words Only Using Regular Expressions in C#?

Match whole words using regular expression in C#

When using regular expressions to find matches in a string, it is crucial to ensure that only whole words are matched. Consider the task of matching specific words such as "shoes", "shirt", and "pants" in a content string.

Initially, one might think that the following regular expression will suffice:

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

However, this regex matches words like "participants" that contain the desired word "pants" but are not complete words themselves.

Solution: Word Boundaries

To solve this problem, word boundary characters (b) must be included in the regular expression. Word boundaries are invisible characters that mark the beginning and end of a word. By using word boundaries, the regex now only matches complete words:

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

New regular expression string search for any word that starts and ends with a word boundary. This ensures that only exact matches of the specified words are found. An additional "@" character at the beginning of a string indicates that the string should be treated as a verbatim string, preventing special characters from being interpreted as metacharacters.

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