.NET Regular Expression white space special characters - c#

This pattern is not working sometimes (it works only for the 3rd instance). The pattern is ^\s*flood\s{55}\s+\w+
I am new to regular expression and I am trying to write a regular expression that captures all the following conditions:
Example 1: flood a)
Example 2: flood As respects
Example 3: flood USD100,000
(it's in a tabular format and there's a lot of space between flood and the next word)

Your expression is saying:
^\s* The start of the string may have zero or more whitespace characters
flood followed by the string flood
\s{55} followed by exactly 55 whitespace characters
\s+\w+ followed by one or more whitespace characters and then one or more word characters.
If you want a minimum number of whitespace characters, say at least 30, followed by one or more word chraracters, then you could do this:
^\s*flood\s{30,}\w+

Try this:
string input =
#" flood a)
flood As respects
flood USD100,000";
string pattern = #"^\s*flood\s+.+$";
MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(input, pattern, RegexOptions.Multiline);

If there are a lot of spaces between flood and the next word you could omit \s{55} which is a quantifier that matches a whitespace character 55 times.
That would leave you with ^\s*flood\s+\w+ which does not yet match all the values at the end because \w matches a word character but not a whitespace or any of ),.
To match your values you might use a character class and add the characters that you allow to match:
^\s*flood\s+[\w,) ]+
Or if you want to match any character you could use a dot instead of a character class.
According to your comment, you might use a positive lookbehind:
(?<=\(13\. Deductible\))\s*(\s*flood\s+[\w,) ]+)+
Demo

Related

Regex for alpha number string in c# accepting underscore and white spaces

I already gone through many post on SO. I didn't find what I needed for my specific scenario.
I need a regex for alpha numeric string.
where following conditions should be matched
Valid string:
ameya123 (alphabets and numbers)
ameya (only alphabets)
AMeya12(Capital and normal alphabets and numbers)
Ameya_123 (alphabets and underscore and numbers)
Ameya_ 123 (alphabets underscore and white speces)
Invalid string:
123 (only numbers)
_ (only underscore)
(only space) (only white spaces)
any special charecter other than underscore
what i tried till now:
(?=.*[a-zA-Z])(?=.*[0-9]*[\s]*[_]*)
the above regex is working in Regex online editor however not working in data annotation in c#
please suggest.
Based on your requirements and not your attempt, what you are in need of is this:
^(?!(?:\d+|_+| +)$)[\w ]+$
The negative lookahead looks for undesired matches to fail the whole process. Those are strings containing digits only, underscores only or spaces only. If they never happen we want to have a match for ^[\w ]+$ which is nearly the same as ^[a-zA-Z0-9_ ]+$.
See live demo here
Explanation:
^ Start of line / string
(?! Start of negative lookahead
(?: Start of non-capturing group
\d+ Match digits
| Or
_+ Match underscores
| Or
[ ]+ Match spaces
)$ End of non-capturing group immediately followed by end of line / string (none of previous matches should be found)
) End of negative lookahead
[\w ]+$ Match a character inside the character set up to end of input string
Note: \w is a shorthand for [a-zA-Z0-9_] unless u modifier is set.
One problem with your regex is that in annotations, the regex must match and consume the entire string input, while your pattern only contains lookarounds that do not consume any text.
You may use
^(?!\d+$)(?![_\s]+$)[A-Za-z0-9\s_]+$
See the regex demo. Note that \w (when used for a server-side validation, and thus parsed with the .NET regex engine) will also allow any Unicode letters, digits and some more stuff when validating on the server side, so I'd rather stick to [A-Za-z0-9_] to be consistent with both server- and client-side validation.
Details
^ - start of string (not necessary here, but good to have when debugging)
(?!\d+$) - a negative lookahead that fails the match if the whole string consists of digits
(?![_\s]+$) - a negative lookahead that fails the match if the whole string consists of underscores and/or whitespaces. NOTE: if you plan to only disallow ____ or " " like inputs, you need to split this lookahead into (?!_+$) and (?!\s+$))
[A-Za-z0-9\s_]+ - 1+ ASCII letters, digits, _ and whitespace chars
$ - end of string (not necessary here, but still good to have).
If I understand your requirements correctly, you need to match one or more letters (uppercase or lowercase), and possibly zero or more of digits, whitespace, or underscore. This implies the following pattern:
^[A-Za-z0-9\s_]*[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9\s_]*$
Demo
In the demo, I have replaced \s with \t \r, because \s was matching across all lines.
Unlike the answers given by #revo and #wiktor, I don't have a fancy looking explanation to the regex. I am beautiful even without my makeup on. Honestly, if you don't understand the pattern I gave, you might want to review a good regex tutorial.
This simple RegEx should do it:
[a-zA-Z]+[0-9_ ]*
One or more Alphabet, followed by zero or more numbers, underscore and Space.
This one should be good:
[\w\s_]*[a-zA-Z]+[\w\s_]*

Regex to capture an exact word in a sentence

I'm having some trouble to capture a specific string inside of a sentence.
The Regex I'm using is \b[0-9]{9,12}\b to capture numbers which have between 9 and 12 digits. The boundary I was using it to specify the exact number, but the problem is, when I have a number which matches with this regex followed by a dot, for example, the regex still matching and giving me much trouble.
As I searched, the problem is that \b uses some special characters as a separator too, right? Then is there a way to consider, for example 123456789. a whole string and the regex will not match with that example?
Thanks !
The word boundary \b requires a non-word character before and after a digit (as a digit is a word character). As dots and commas are non-word characters, they are allowed. To make sure the digit sequence between dots is not matched, you need to use lookarounds.
You can use
\b(?<!\.)[0-9]{9,12}(?!\.)\b
See the regex demo
The additional subpatterns are the lookbehind (?<!\.) and a lookahead (?!\.) that make sure there are no . before and after the digit sequence.
If you have . and , as decimal separators, you may want to adjust the pattern to
\b(?<![.,])[0-9]{9,12}(?![.,])\b

Regex to match trimmed string consisting of words separated by only 1 space char

I am looking for a regex to validate input in C#. The regex has to match an arbitrary number of words which are separated with only 1 space character in between. The matched string cannot start or end with whitespace characters (this is where my problem is).
Example: some sample input 123
What I've tried: /^(\S+[ ]{0,1})+$/gm this pattern almost does what is required but it also matches 1 trailing space.
Any ideas? Thanks.
I tried this one and it seems to work:
Regex regex = new Regex(#"^\S+([ ]{1}\S+)*$");
It checks if your string starts with a word followed by zero or more entities of a single white space followed by a word. So trailing white spaces are not allowed.

How to insert spaces between characters using Regex?

Trying to learn a little more about using Regex (Regular expressions). Using Microsoft's version of Regex in C# (VS 2010), how could I take a simple string like:
"Hello"
and change it to
"H e l l o"
This could be a string of any letter or symbol, capitals, lowercase, etc., and there are no other letters or symbols following or leading this word. (The string consists of only the one word).
(I have read the other posts, but I can't seem to grasp Regex. Please be kind :) ).
Thanks for any help with this. (an explanation would be most useful).
You could do this through regex only, no need for inbuilt c# functions.
Use the below regexes and then replace the matched boundaries with space.
(?<=.)(?!$)
DEMO
string result = Regex.Replace(yourString, #"(?<=.)(?!$)", " ");
Explanation:
(?<=.) Positive lookbehind asserts that the match must be preceded by a character.
(?!$) Negative lookahead which asserts that the match won't be followed by an end of the line anchor. So the boundaries next to all the characters would be matched but not the one which was next to the last character.
OR
You could also use word boundaries.
(?<!^)(\B|b)(?!$)
DEMO
string result = Regex.Replace(yourString, #"(?<!^)(\B|b)(?!$)", " ");
Explanation:
(?<!^) Negative lookbehind which asserts that the match won't be at the start.
(\B|\b) Matches the boundary which exists between two word characters and two non-word characters (\B) or match the boundary which exists between a word character and a non-word character (\b).
(?!$) Negative lookahead asserts that the match won't be followed by an end of the line anchor.
Regex.Replace("Hello", "(.)", "$1 ").TrimEnd();
Explanation
The dot character class matches every character of your string "Hello".
The paranthesis around the dot character are required so that we could refer to the captured character through the $n notation.
Each captured character is replaced by the replacement string. Our replacement string is "$1 " (notice the space at the end). Here $1 represents the first captured group in the input, therefore our replacement string will replace each character by that character plus one space.
This technique will add one space after the final character "o" as well, so we call TrimEnd() to remove that.
A demo can be seen here.
For the enthusiast, the same effect can be achieve through LINQ using this one-liner:
String.Join(" ", YourString.AsEnumerable())
or if you don't want to use the extension method:
String.Join(" ", YourString.ToCharArray())
It's very simple. To match any character use . dot and then replace with that character along with one extra space
Here parenthesis (...) are used for grouping that can be accessed by $index
Find what : "(.)"
Replace with "$1 "
DEMO

C# Regex match on special characters

I know this stuff has been talked about a lot, but I'm having a problem trying to match the following...
Example input: "test test 310-315"
I need a regex expression that recognizes a number followed by a dash, and returns 310. How do I include the dash in the regex expression though. So the final match result would be: "310".
Thanks a lot - kcross
EDIT: Also, how would I do the same thing but with the dash preceding, but also take into account that the number following the dash could be a negative number... didnt think of this one when I wrote the question immediately. for example: "test test 310--315" returns -315 and "test 310-315" returns 315.
Regex regex = new Regex(#"\d+(?=\-)");
\d+ - Looks for one or more digits
(?=\-) - Makes sure it is followed by a dash
The # just eliminates the need to escape the backslashes to keep the compiler happy.
Also, you may want this instead:
\d+(?=\-\d+)
This will check for a one or more numbers, followed by a dash, followed by one or more numbers, but only match the first set.
In response to your comment, here's a regex that will check for a number following a -, while accounting for potential negative (-) numbers:
Regex regex = new Regex(#"(?<=\-)\-?\d+");
(?<=\-) - Negative lookbehind which will check and make sure there is a preceding -
\-? - Checks for either zero or one dashes
\d+ - One or more digits
(?'number'\d+)- will work ( no need to escape ). In this example the group containing the single number is the named group 'number'.
if you want to match both groups with optional sign try:
#"(?'first'-?\d+)-(?'second'-?\d+)"
See it working here.
Just to describe, nothing complicated, just using -? to match an optional - and \d+ to match one or more digit. a literal - match itself.
here's some documentation that I use:
http://www.mikesdotnetting.com/Article/46/CSharp-Regular-Expressions-Cheat-Sheet
in the comments section of that page, it suggests escaping the dash with '\-'
make sure you escape your escape character \
You would escape the special meaning of - in regex language (means range) using a backslash (\). Since backslash has a special meaning in C# literals to escape quotes or be part of some characters, you need to escape that with another backslash(\). So essentially it would be \d+\\-.
\b\d*(?=\-) you will want to look ahead for the dash
\b = is start at a word boundry
\d = match any decimal digit
* = match the previous as many times as needed
(?=\-) = look ahead for the dash
Edited for Formatting issue with the slash not showing after posting

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