Question

I have a problem dealing with the @ symbol in Regex, I am trying to remove @sometext
from a text string can’t seem to find anywhere where it uses the @ as a literal. I have tried myself but doesn’t remove the word from the string. Any ideas?

public string removeAtSymbol(string input)
{
    Regex findWords = new Regex(______);//Find the words like "@text"
    Regex[] removeWords;

    string test = input; 
    MatchCollection all = findWords.Matches(test);
    removeWords = new Regex[all.Count];
    int index = 0;
    string[] values = new string[all.Count];

    YesOutputBox.Text = " you got here";

    foreach (Match m in all) //List all the words
    {
        values[index] = m.Value.Trim();
        index++;
        YesOutputBox.Text = YesOutputBox.Text + " " + m.Value;
    }

    for (int i = 0; i < removeWords.Length; i++)
    {
        removeWords[i] = new Regex(" " + values[i]);

        // If the words appears more than one time
        if (removeWords[i].Matches(test).Count > 1)
        {
            removeWords[i] = new Regex(" " + values[i] + " ");
            test = removeWords[i].Replace(test, " "); //Remove the first word.
        }
    }

    return test;
}

Answer 1

You can remove all occurences of "@sometext" from string test via the method

Regex.Replace(test, "@sometext", "")

or for any word starting with "@" you can use

Regex.Replace(test, "@\\w+", "")

If you need specifically a separate word (i.e. nothing like @comp within [e-mail]) you may preceed the regex with a special word boundary (\b does not work here):

Regex.Replace(test, "(^|\\W)@\\w+", "")