The Regex Class

The .NET Framework provides an object-oriented approach to regular expression pattern matching and replacement.

The Framework Class Library (FCL) namespace System.Text.RegularExpressions is the home to all the .NET Framework objects associated with regular expressions. The central class for regular expression support is Regex, which provides methods and properties for working with regular expressions, the most important of which are shown in Table 15-3.

Table 15-3. Regex members

Method or property	Explanation
Regex constructor	Overloaded; creates an instance of Regex
Options	Property that returns the options passed in to the constructor
IsMatch	Method that indicates whether a match is found in the input string
Match	Searches an input string and returns a match for a regular expression
Matches	Searches an input string and returns all successful matches for a regular expression
Replace	Replaces all occurrences of a pattern with a replacement string
Split	Splits an input string into an array of substrings based on a regular expression

Example 15-9 rewrites Example 15-8 to use regular expressions and thus to solve the problem of searching for more than one type of delimiter.

Example 15-9. Regular expressions are indispensable for matching patterns in text

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace Example_15_9_  _  _  _Regular_Expressions
{
    class Tester
    {
        public void Run( )
        {
            string s1 =
            "One,Two,Three Liberty Associates, Inc.";
            Regex theRegex = new Regex(" |, |,");
            StringBuilder sBuilder = new StringBuilder( );
            int id = 1;

            foreach (string subString in theRegex.Split(s1))
            {
                sBuilder.AppendFormat("{0}: {1}\n", id++, subString);
            }
            Console.WriteLine("{0}", sBuilder);
        }

        static void Main( )
        {
            Tester t = new Tester( );
            t.Run( );
        }
    }
}

The output looks like this:

1: One
2: Two
3: Three
4: Liberty
5: Associates
6: Inc.

Example 15-9 begins by creating a string, s1, identical to the string used in Example 15-8:

string s1 = "One,Two,Three Liberty Associates, Inc.";

and a regular expression that is used to search the string:

Regex theRegex = new Regex(" |,|, ");

One of the overloaded constructors for Regex takes a regular expression string as its parameter.

Tip

This can be a bit confusing. In the context of a C# program, which is the regular expression—the text passed in to the constructor or the Regex object itself? It is true that the text string passed to the constructor is a regular expression in the traditional sense of the term. From a C# (that is, object-oriented) point of view, however, the argument to the constructor is just a string of characters; it is the object called theRegex that is the regular expression object.

The rest of the program proceeds like Example 15-8, except that rather than calling the Split( ) method of String on string s1, the Split( ) method of Regex is called. theRegex.Split( ) acts in much the same way as String.Split( ), returning an array of strings as a result of matching the regular expression pattern within theRegex. Because it matches a regular expression, rather than using a set of delimiters, you have much greater control over how the string is split.