Regular expressions are powerful tools for text processing and allow searching matches by a pattern. Regular expressions make text processing easier and more accurate, such as,
In C#, Regex represents the regular expression engine. It can be used to quickly parse large amounts of text to find specific character patterns to extract, edit, replace, or delete text substrings.
Let's have a look into a simple example that creates a Regex from a pattern to match a word starting with char "S".
string customers = "John, samantha, Andy, Smith, Allen, Mark, Stella, Scarlett";
// Create a pattern for a word that starts with letter "S"
string pattern = @"\b[S]\w+";
Regex expr = new Regex(pattern);
MatchCollection matchedCustomers = expr.Matches(customers);
Console.WriteLine("The following names of the customers start with \"S\"\n");
foreach (var match in matchedCustomers)
{
Console.WriteLine(match);
}
The \b[S]\w+ creates a pattern for a word that starts with the letter "S". Let's run the above code and you will see the following output.
The following names of the customers start with "S"
Smith
Stella
Scarlett
As you can see the pattern only matches the names that start with "S" and ignore the name that start with "s". You can use the RegexOptions.IgnoreCase parameter to make sure that Regex does not look for uppercase or lowercase.
string customers = "John, samantha, Andy, Smith, Allen, Mark, Stella, Scarlett";
// Create a pattern for a word that starts with letter "S"
string pattern = @"\b[S]\w+";
Regex expr = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
MatchCollection matchedCustomers = expr.Matches(customers);
Console.WriteLine("The following names of the customers start with \"S\" or or \"s\"\n");
foreach (var match in matchedCustomers)
{
Console.WriteLine(match);
}
Let's run the above code and you will see the following output.
The following names of the customers start with "S" or or "s"
samantha
Smith
Stella
Scarlett
Let's consider another example, where we want to validate an email Ids.
private static bool IsValidEmail(string email)
{
// This Pattern is use to verify the email
string strRegex = @"\A(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*@(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?)\Z";
Regex re = new Regex(strRegex, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
if (re.IsMatch(email))
return (true);
else
return (false);
}
You can call the IsValidEmail() bypassing the user email as a parameter, if it is a valid email it will return true, otherwise, false.
string[] emails =
{
"[email protected]",
"[email protected]",
"stella@gmail",
"[email protected]",
"mark.gmail.com",
"@gmail.com"
};
foreach (string email in emails)
{
if (IsValidEmail(email))
Console.WriteLine("{0, 20}: is a valid E-mail address.", email);
else
Console.WriteLine("{0, 20}: is not a valid E-mail address.", email);
}
Let's run the above code and you will see the following output.
[email protected]: is a valid E-mail address.
[email protected]: is a valid E-mail address.
stella@gmail: is not a valid E-mail address.
[email protected]: is a valid E-mail address.
mark.gmail.com: is not a valid E-mail address.
@gmail.com: is not a valid E-mail address.
For more information about Regular Expressions, visit https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.text.regularexpressions.regex
All the examples related to the regular expressions are available in the RegularExpressionsTests.cs file of the source code. Download the source code and try out all the examples for better understanding.