Question

I am trying to substrings if they have certain format. Substring Regex query is [CENAOD(xyx)]. I have done following code but when running this in cycle it says all results match which is wrong. Where I’ve done something wrong?

string strRegex = @"(\[CENAOD\((\S|\W)*\)\])*";
string strCenaOd = sReader["intro"].ToString()
if (Regex.IsMatch(strCenaOd, strRegex, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase))
{
      string = (want to read content of ( ) = xyz in example)
}

Answer 1

Adding to @Kent’s and @leppie’s answers, the code surrounding the regex needs work, too. I think this is what you were trying for:

string strRegex = @"\[CENAOD\(([^)]*)\)\]";
string strCenaOd = sReader["intro"].ToString();
Match m = Regex.Match(strCenaOd, strRegex, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
if (m.Success)
{
  string content = m.Groups[1];
  // ...
}

IsMatch() is a simple yes-or-no check, it doesn’t provide any way to retrieve the matched text.

I especially want to comment on (\S|\W)*, from your regex. First, \S|\W is a very inefficient way to match any character. . is usually all you need, but as Kent pointed out, [^)] (i.e., any character except )) is more appropriate in this case. Also, by placing the * outside the round brackets, you’ll only ever capture the last character. ([^)]*) captures all of them. For more details, read this.