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regex to find a word before and after a specific word

Asked 2011-04-29T13:29:42.853
13

I need a regex that gives me the word before and after a specific word, included the search word itself.

Like: "This is some dummy text to find a word" should give me a string of "dummy text to" when text is my search word.

Another question, it's possible that the string provided will contain more then once the search word so I must be able to retrieve all matches in that string with C#.

Like "This is some dummy text to find a word in a string full with text and words" Should return:

  • "dummy text to"
  • "with text and"

EDIT: Actually I should have all the matches returned that contain the search word. A few examples: Text is too read. -> Text is

Read my text. -> my text

This is a text-field example -> a text-field example

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2 Answers

17

EDIT:

If you want to grab all the content from the space before first word to the space after the word use:

(?:\S+\s)?\S*text\S*(?:\s\S+)?

A simple tests:

string input = @"
    This is some dummy text to find a word in a string full with text and words
    Text is too read
    Read my text.
    This is a text-field example
    this is some dummy la@text.be to read";

var matches = Regex.Matches(
    input,
    @"(?:\S+\s)?\S*text\S*(?:\s\S+)?",
    RegexOptions.IgnoreCase
);

the matches are:

dummy text to
with text and
Text is
my text.
a text-field example
dummy la@text.be to
answered 2011-04-29T14:22:54.493
1
([A-z]+) text ([A-z]+)

would do nicely

answered 2011-04-29T13:32:33.223

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