Whole word match when wildcard exist in search pattern

Question

Hi all,

I encounter a case when using Regex.

My search pattern is like "He*lo", and I want to find whole word matched only.

So my search pattern will be searchpattern="(\\W|^)" + "He*lo"+ "(\\W|$)"

Search text: "HellPokkllo"   --- It returns correct result using Regex.IsMatch("HellPokkllo",searchpattern)

However, if my search text likes "Hel  Pokkllo"---expected result will be not match because there exists space in text, but actually it returns true. It considers search text with space as one word.

How to handle it?

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Hard hard work, Day day up!

Answer 1

Try this

searchpattern="(\\W|^)" + "He[a-zA-Z]+lo"+ "(\\W|$)"

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jdweng

Answer 2

Thank you for your reply.

Actually, I know that it works if I use [a-zA-Z], but I have to stay with pattern "He*lo", at least, I have to keep "He*lo", add pattern is allowed, alter is not...

Is there any solution else?

Thanks again.

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Hard hard work, Day day up!

Answer 3

YOu have to change the "He*lo" because the * includes a white space and you need to exclude the white space.  Is [^ ] acceptable?

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jdweng

Answer 4

Hi Joel,

If I have to change the pattern, what's the best pattern?

My concern is that I used "\W"(match whole word only, right?) in original pattern, why it matchs "\W" even search text has whitespace there?

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Hard hard work, Day day up!

Answer 5

Hi Stephan,

Thank you for posting on this forum.

When you need to change the pattern, please try the suggestion Joel provided earlier.

"\W" means any non-word characters: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/az24scfc.aspx 

\w	Matches any word character.	\w	"I", "D", "A", "1", "3" in "ID A1.3"
\W	Matches any non-word character.	\W	" ", "." in "ID A1.3"

I hope this is clear.

Best regards,

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Mike Feng
MSDN Community Support | Feedback to us
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Answer 6

The pattern \S+ is the closest to your orignal pattern which will match any characters except white spaces.  So try this

searchpattern="(\\W|^)" + "He\S+lo"+ "(\\W|$)"

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jdweng