C# RegEx to find values within a string

Question

I am new to RegEx. I have a string like following. I want to get the values between [{# #}]

Ex: "Employee name is [{#John#}], works for [{#ABC Bank#}], [{#Houston#}]"

I would like to get the following values from the above string.

"John",
"ABC Bank",
"Houston"

It's not the best writing ever, but it looks pretty clear to me that he wants to extract values between hashes on strings that looks like: '[{# EXTRACT_THIS #}]' Regex might be one way of doing it — Alex, Sep 04 '17 at 00:07
We have to know what # is. You can't expect anyone to write an expression to pull data from a string if we don't know what the rest of the string is — anomeric, Sep 04 '17 at 00:19
@anomeric. '#' is just a character like '[' and '{' . Basically I am looking to extract text between [{#.....#}] . — Satya Sahoo, Sep 04 '17 at 00:26
If it is &"[" or "{" then we can work with that. You have to tell us what characters we're parsing between — anomeric, Sep 04 '17 at 00:33

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 04 '17 at 05:18

Based on the solution Regular Expression Groups in C#. You can try this:

       string sentence = "Employee name is [{#john#}], works for [{#ABC BANK#}], 
        [{#Houston#}]";
        string pattern = @"\[\{\#(.*?)\#\}\]";

        foreach (Match match in Regex.Matches(sentence, pattern))
        {
            if (match.Success && match.Groups.Count > 0)
            {
                var text = match.Groups[1].Value;
                Console.WriteLine(text);
            }
        }
        Console.ReadLine();

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 04 '17 at 02:27

Based on the solution and awesome breakdown for matching patterns inside wrapping patterns you could try:

\[\{\#(?<Text>(?:(?!\#\}\]).)*)\#\}\]

Where \[\{\# is your escaped opening sequence of [{# and \#\}\] is the escaped closing sequence of #}].

Your inner values are in the matching group named Text.

string strRegex = @"\[\{\#(?<Text>(?:(?!\#\}\]).)*)\#\}\]";
Regex myRegex = new Regex(strRegex, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Multiline | RegexOptions.Singleline);
string strTargetString = @"Employee name is [{#John#}], works for [{#ABC Bank#}], [{#Houston#}]";

foreach (Match myMatch in myRegex.Matches(strTargetString))
{
  if (myMatch.Success)
  {
    var text = myMatch.Groups["Text"].Value;

    // TODO: Do something with it.
  }
}

score -2 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 04 '17 at 02:26

using System;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(Test("the quick brown [{#fox#}] jumps over the lazy dog."));
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        public static string Test(string str)
        {

            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(str))
                return string.Empty;


            var result = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(str, @".*\[{#", string.Empty, RegexOptions.Singleline);
            result = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Replace(result, @"\#}].*", string.Empty, RegexOptions.Singleline);

            return result;

        }

    }
}

C# RegEx to find values within a string

3 Answers3