C# Cookbook

8.11. Finding a Particular Occurrence of a Match

Problem

You need to find a specific occurrence of a match within a string. For example, you want to find the third occurrence of a word or the second occurrence of a Social Security Number. In addition, you may need to find every third occurrence of a word in a string.

Solution

To find a particular occurrence of a match in a string, simply subscript the array returned from Regex.Matches:

public static Match FindOccurrenceOf(string source, string pattern,
                                     int occurrence)
{
    if (occurrence < 1)
    {
        throw (new ArgumentException("Cannot be less than 1", 
                                     "occurrence"));
    }

    // Make occurrence zero-based
    --occurrence;

    // Run the regex once on the source string
    Regex RE = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.Multiline);
    MatchCollection theMatches = RE.Matches(source);

    if (occurrence >= theMatches.Count)
    {
        return (null);
    }
    else
    {
        return (theMatches[occurrence]);
    }
}

To find each particular occurrence of a match in a string, build an ArrayList on the fly:

public static ArrayList FindEachOccurrenceOf(string source, string pattern,
                                             int occurrence)
{
    ArrayList occurrences = new ArrayList( );

    // Run the regex once on the source string
    Regex RE = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.Multiline);
    MatchCollection theMatches = RE.Matches(source);

    for (int index = (occurrence - 1); 
      index < theMatches.Count; index += occurrence)
    {
        occurrences.Add(theMatches[index]);
    }

    return (occurrences);
}

The following method shows how to invoke the two previous methods:

public static ...