VB.NET Replacing a String with Regular Expressions

Question

I'm having a few problems with Regular Expressions in VB.NET.

I have a String like this one: "[Type=User][User=Hello]Thats the message"

I want to have the "Thats the message" part, so I thought that the best way to do that was replacing "[Type=User][User=Hello]" for "".

Notes:

"Thats the message" is always at the end of the String and it can be "" (without characters).
[Type=XXXX] can be anything, I mean, it can be [Type=Password], [Type=Message]...

So, here is what I did:

Dim regOptions As RegexOptions = RegexOptions.IgnoreCase Or RegexOptions.Singleline
Regex.Replace(buffer, "^(.*)[^\]]*$", "", regOptions)

It doesn't work, the string 'buffer' is not modified.

Surly you could use String.Split for this, using ] as the delimiter character? — Oded
– Oded, Commented Oct 2, 2012 at 12:47

Rowland Shaw · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-02 12:32:24Z

4

According to the documentation of that overload it will return the resulting string (after all, in .Net strings are immutable).

So, instead, try:

buffer = Regex.Replace(buffer, "^(.*)[^\]]*$", "", regOptions)

answered Oct 2, 2012 at 12:32

Rowland Shaw

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2 Comments

Right. Also, I don't think that pattern will work. Why not just \[.*\] ?

A better pattern might be \[([^\]]+)\], but the reason the replacement wasn't doing anything was that the result was never read...