Regular Expressions Cookbook

3.11. Iterate over All Matches

Problem

The previous recipe shows how a regex could be applied repeatedly to a string to get a list of matches. Now you want to iterate over all the matches in your own code.

Solution

C#

You can use the static call when you process only a small number of strings with the same regular expression:

Match matchResult = Regex.Match(subjectString, @"\d+");
while (matchResult.Success) {
    // Here you can process the match stored in matchResult
    matchResult = matchResult.NextMatch();
}

Construct a Regex object if you want to use the same regular expression with a large number of strings:

Regex regexObj = new Regex(@"\d+");
matchResult = regexObj.Match(subjectString);
while (matchResult.Success) {
    // Here you can process the match stored in matchResult
    matchResult = matchResult.NextMatch();
}

VB.NET

You can use the static call when you process only a small number of strings with the same regular expression:

Dim MatchResult = Regex.Match(SubjectString, "\d+")
While MatchResult.Success
    'Here you can process the match stored in MatchResult
    MatchResult = MatchResult.NextMatch
End While

Construct a Regex object if you want to use the same regular expression with a large number of strings:

Dim RegexObj As New Regex("\d+")
Dim MatchResult = RegexObj.Match(SubjectString)
While MatchResult.Success
    'Here you can process the match stored in MatchResult
    MatchResult = MatchResult.NextMatch
End While

Java

Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("\\d+"); Matcher regexMatcher = regex.matcher(subjectString); ...