Question

I am trying to match name patters. A name can either be

lastname,firstname middleinitial

or

lastname,firstname

i am trying to create a regex to check the last 2 chars of a string are [space][anychar]

I found a tutorial online which says to match A to the end of the string you do

 A$

"A" at the end of a line

In applying this to mine i was trying to do something like this, and a number of forms of this too. I literally have no idea though :/

([\\s][A-Za-z]$) 

Answer 1

You can easily check the last two characters without a regular expression.

bool hasMiddleInitial = false;
if (name.Length > 1 &&
    name[name.Length-2] == ' ' &&
    char.IsLetter(name, name.Length-1))
{
    hasMiddleInitial = true;
}

This is both clearer (more readable) and also executes faster than a regular expression. And it keeps you from having to worry about non-English letters (A-Z is a very limited set!).

(P.S. You could also use char.IsWhiteSpace instead of directly comparing to ' '; then it would work with other space characters too. For example, Asian users are likely to enter a U+3000 ideographic space instead of the standard U+0020 space.)