Regex - Match everything except specified characters or split the string

Question

I'm using this Regex [^,]+ that matches groups of non-commas but it needs to do this also for characters ; , \n and empty space.

I have this string 12f3,, 456;;;;\n\n227- , 999 from which I need to get all the substrings like 12f3 , 456, 227- and 999.

Is there a way of matching everything except some specified characters, or is best to use split in this situation?

@WiktorStribiżew For \s I'm getting 'Unrecognized escape sequence' — LAffair, Dec 15 '21 at 09:24
So you using old version of Java, right? Or are you coding in C#? — Wiktor Stribiżew, Dec 15 '21 at 09:25
Then use `@"[^\s;,]+"`, see the answer for more details and demos. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Dec 15 '21 at 09:27
Of course, `[;,]` is not an answer to this question. The requirements are not the same for this and [that question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1409162). — Wiktor Stribiżew, Dec 16 '21 at 08:44

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2021-12-15T09:33:19.540

You can match these substrings with [^\s;,]+ pattern. Splitting with [\s;,]+ is not recommended as there are often empty strings in the resulting array after splitting (due to either matches at the start/end of string, or consecutive matches).

See the regex demo.

In C#, use

var matches = Regex.Matches(text, @"[^\s;,]+")
    .Cast<Match>()
    .Select(x => x.Value)
    .ToList();

The [^\s;,]+ matches one or more (due to + quantifier) occurrences of any char other than ([^...] is a negated character class) a whitespace (\s), semi-colona dn a comma.

Non-regex approach

You can split your string with comma and semi-colon, remove empty entries and then trim the strings in the resulting array:

var text = "12f3,,   456;;;;\n\n227-   ,    999";
var res = text.Split(new[] {";", ","}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
    .Select(x => x.Trim());
Console.WriteLine(string.Join("\n", res));

See the C# demo. Output:

Regex - Match everything except specified characters or split the string

1 Answers1