Regular Expressions Cookbook

3.7. Retrieve the Matched Text

Problem

You have a regular expression that matches a part of the subject text, and you want to extract the text that was matched. If the regular expression can match the string more than once, you want only the first match. For example, when applying the regex ‹\d+› to the string Do you like 13 or 42?, 13 should be returned.

Solution

C#

For quick one-off matches, you can use the static call:

string resultString = Regex.Match(subjectString, @"\d+").Value;

If the regex is provided by the end user, you should use the static call with full exception handling:

string resultString = null;
try {
    resultString = Regex.Match(subjectString, @"\d+").Value;
} catch (ArgumentNullException ex) {
    // Cannot pass null as the regular expression or subject string
} catch (ArgumentException ex) {
    // Syntax error in the regular expression
}

To use the same regex repeatedly, construct a Regex object:

Regex regexObj = new Regex(@"\d+");
string resultString = regexObj.Match(subjectString).Value;

If the regex is provided by the end user, you should use the Regex object with full exception handling:

string resultString = null;
try {
    Regex regexObj = new Regex(@"\d+");
    try {
        resultString = regexObj.Match(subjectString).Value;
    } catch (ArgumentNullException ex) {
        // Cannot pass null as the subject string
    }
} catch (ArgumentException ex) {
    // Syntax error in the regular expression
}

VB.NET

For quick one-off matches, you can use the static call:

Dim ResultString = Regex.Match(SubjectString, "\d+").Value ...