I'm trying to extract values from a string which are between << and >>. But they could happen multiple times.
Can anyone help with the regular expression to match these;
this is a test for <<bob>> who like <<books>>
test 2 <<frank>> likes nothing
test 3 <<what>> <<on>> <<earth>> <<this>> <<is>> <<too>> <<much>>.
I then want to foreach the GroupCollection to get all the values.
Any help greatly received. Thanks.
Use a positive look ahead and look behind assertion to match the angle brackets, use .*? to match the shortest possible sequence of characters between those brackets. Find all values by iterating the MatchCollection returned by the Matches() method.
var regex = new Regex("(?<=<<).*?(?=>>)");
foreach (var match in regex.Matches(
"this is a test for <<bob>> who like <<books>>"))
{
Console.WriteLine(match.Value);
}
While Peter's answer is a good example of using lookarounds for left and right hand context checking, I'd like to also add a LINQ (lambda) way to access matches/groups and show the use of simple numeric capturing groups that come handy when you want to extract only a part of the pattern:
using System.Linq;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
// ...
var results = Regex.Matches(s, @"<<(.*?)>>", RegexOptions.Singleline)
.Cast<Match>()
.Select(x => x.Groups[1].Value);
Same approach with Peter's compiled regex where the whole match value is accessed via Match.Value:
var results = regex.Matches(s).Cast<Match>().Select(x => x.Value);
Note:
<<(.*?)>> is a regex matching <<, then capturing any 0 or more chars as few as possible (due to the non-greedy *? quantifier) into Group 1 and then matching >>RegexOptions.Singleline makes . match newline (LF) chars, too (it does not match them by default)Cast<Match>() casts the match collection to a IEnumerable<Match> that you may further access using a lambdaSelect(x => x.Groups[1].Value) only returns the Group 1 value from the current x match object.ToList() or .ToArray() after Select.In the demo C# code, string.Join(", ", results) generates a comma-separated string of the Group 1 values:
var strs = new List<string> { "this is a test for <<bob>> who like <<books>>",
"test 2 <<frank>> likes nothing",
"test 3 <<what>> <<on>> <<earth>> <<this>> <<is>> <<too>> <<much>>." };
foreach (var s in strs)
{
var results = Regex.Matches(s, @"<<(.*?)>>", RegexOptions.Singleline)
.Cast<Match>()
.Select(x => x.Groups[1].Value);
Console.WriteLine(string.Join(", ", results));
}
Output:
bob, books
frank
what, on, earth, this, is, too, much
You can try one of these:
(?<=<<)[^>]+(?=>>)
(?<=<<)\w+(?=>>)
However you will have to iterate the returned MatchCollection.
Something like this:
(<<(?<element>[^>]*)>>)*
This program might be useful:
