Question

I am trying to write a regexp which would match a comma separated list of words and capture all words. This line should be matched    apple , banana ,orange,peanut  and captures should be apple, banana, orange, peanut. To do that I use following regexp:

^\s*([a-z_]\w*)(?:\s*,\s*([a-z_]\w*))*\s*$

It successfully matches the string but all of a sudden only apple and peanut are captured. This behaviour is seen in both C# and Perl. Thus I assume I am missing something about how regexp matching works. Any ideas? 🙂

Answer 1

The value given by match.Groups[2].Value is just the last value captured by the second group.

To find all the values, look at match.Groups[2].Captures[i].Value where in this case i ranges from 0 to 2. (As well as match.Groups[1].Value for the first group.)

(+1 for question, I learned something today!)