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C# Regex boundary with special characters

I want to have a Regex that finds "Attributable".
I tried #"\bAttributable\b" but the \b boundary doesn't work with special characters.
For example, it wouldn't differentiate Attributable and Non-Attributable. Is there any way to Regex for Attributable and not it's negative?

Do a negative look-behind?
(?<!-)\bAttributable\b
Obviously this only checks for -s. If you want to check for other characters, put them in a character class in the negative look-behind:
(?<![-^])\bAttributable\b
Alternatively, if you just want to not match Non-Attributable but do match SomethingElse-Attributable, then put Non- in the look-behind:
(?<!Non-)\bAttributable\b

There are several ways to fix the issue like you have but it all depends on the real requirements. It is sometimes necessary to precise what "word boundary" you need in each concrete case, since \b word boundary is 1) context dependent, and 2) matches specific places in the string that you should be aware of:
Before the first character in the string, if the first character is a
word character.
After the last character in the string, if the last
character is a word character.
Between two characters in the string,
where one is a word character and the other is not a word character.
Now, here are several approaches that you may follow:
When you only care about compound words usually joined with hyphens (similar #Sweeper's answer): (?<!-)\bAttributable\b(?!-)
Only match between whitespaces or start/end of string: (?<!\S)Attributable(?!\S). NOTE: Actually, if it is what you want, you may do without a regex by using s.Split().Contains("Attributable")
Only match if not preceded with punctuation and there is no letter/digit/underscore right after: (?<!\p{P})Attributable\b
Only match if not preceded with punctation symbols but some specific ones (say, you want to match the word after a comma and a colon): (?<![^\P{P},;])Attributable\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.

Ignore spaces at the end of a string

I use the following regex, which is working, but I want to add a condition so as to accept spaces at the end of the value. Currently it is not working.
What am I missinghere?
^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_]+\s?$[\s]*$

Assumption: you added the two end of string anchors $ by mistake.
? quantifier, matching one or zero repetitions, makes the previous item optional
* quantifier, matching zero or more repetitions
So change your expression to
^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_]+\s*$
this is matching any amount of whitespace at the end of the string.
Be aware, whitespace is not just the space character, it is also tabs and newlines (and more)!
If you really want to match only space, just write a space or make a character class with all the characters you want to match.
^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_]+ *$
or
^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_]+[ \t]*$
Next thing is: Are you sure you only want plain ASCII letters? Today there is Unicode and you can use Unicode properties, scripts and blocks in your regular expressions.
Your expression in Unicode, allowing all letters and digits.
^\p{L}\w+\s*$
\p{L} Unicode property, any kind of letter from any language.
\w shorthand character class for word characters (letters, digits and connector characters like "_") [\p{L}\p{Nd}\p{Pc}] as character class with Unicode properties. Definition on msdn

why two dollars?
^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_]+\s*$
or make it this :
"^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_]+\s?\$\s*$"
if you want to literally match the dollar.

Try this -
"^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_]+(\s)?$"
or this -
"^[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_]+((\s){,})$"
$ indicates end of expression, if you are looking $ as character, then escape it with \

regex check for white space in middle of string

I want to validate that the characters are alpha numeric:
Regex aNum = Regex("[a-z][A-Z][0-9]");
I want to add the option that there might be a white space, so it would be a two word expression:
Regex aNum = Regex("[a-z][A-Z][0-9]["\\s]");
but couldn't find the correct syntax.
id applicate any incite.

[A-Za-z0-9\s]{1,} should work for you. It matches any string which contains alphanumeric or whitespace characters and is at least one char long. If you accept underscores, too you shorten it to [\w\s]{1,}.
You should add ^ and $ to verify the whole string matches and not only a part of the string:
^[A-Za-z0-9\s]{1,}$ or ^[\w\s]{1,}$.

Exactly two words with single space:
Regex aNum = Regex("[a-zA-Z0-9]+[\s][a-zA-Z0-9]+");
OR any number of words having any number of spaces:
Regex aNum = Regex("[a-zA-Z0-9\s]");

"[A-Za-z0-9\s]*"
matches alphanumeric characters and whitespace. If you want a word that can contain whitespace but want to ensure it starts and ends with an alphanumeric character you could try
"[A-Za-z0-9][A-Za-z0-9\s]*[A-Za-z0-9]|[A-Za-z0-9]"

To not allow empty strings then
Regex.IsMatch(s ?? "",#"^[\w\s]+$");
and to allow empty strings
Regex.IsMatch(s ?? "",#"^[\w\s]*$");
I added the ?? "" as IsMatch does not accept null arguments

If you want to check for white space in middle of string you can use these patterns :
"(\w\s)+" : this must match a word with a white space at least.
"(\w\s)+$" : this must match a word with a white space at least and must finish with white space.
"[\w\s]+" : this match for word or white space or the two.

why do these regex tests let certain characters pass?

I am checking a string with the following regexes:
[a-zA-Z0-9]+
[A-Za-z]+
For some reason, the characters:
.
-
_
are allowed to pass, why is that?

If you want to check that the complete string consists of only the wanted characters you need to anchor your regex like follows:
^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$
Otherwise every string will pass that contains a string of the allowed characters somewhere. The anchors essentially tell the regular expression engine to start looking for those characters at the start of the string and stop looking at the end of the string.
To clarify: If you just use [a-zA-Z0-9]+ as your regex, then the regex engine would rightfully reject the string -__-- as the regex doesn't match against that. There is no single character from the character class you defined.
However, with the string a-b it's different. The regular expression engine will match the first a here since that matches the expression you entered (at least one of the given characters) and won't care about the - or the b. It has done its job and successfully matched a substring according to your regular expression.
Similarly with _-abcdef- – the regex will match the substring abcdef just fine, because you didn't tell it to match only at the start or end of the string; and ignore the other characters.
So when using ^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$ as your regex you are telling the regex engine definitely that you are looking for one or more letters or digits, starting at the very beginning of the string right until the end of the string. There is no room for other characters to squeeze in or hide so this will do what you apparently want. But without the anchors, the match can be anywhere in your search string. For validation purposes you always want to use those anchors.

In regular expressions the + tells the engine to match one or more characters.
So this expression [A-Za-z]+ passes if the string contains a sequence of 1 or more alphabetic characters. The only strings that wouldn't pass are strings that contain no alphabetic characters at all.
The ^ symbol anchors the character class to the beginning of the string and the $ symbol anchors to the end of the string.
So ^[A-Za-z0-9]+ means 'match a string that begins with a sequence of one or more alphanumeric characters'. But would allow strings that include non-alphanumerics so long as those characters were not at the beginning of the string.
While ^[A-Za-z0-9]+$ means 'match a string that begins and ends with a sequence of one or more alphanumeric characters'. This is the only way to completely exclude non-alphanumerics from a string.