Question

I have a regex expression that I’m trying to construct that processes a file path and tries to find a file path whose directory ends with “Processed” or “Failed”.

I have something like this…

        static string PROCESSED_DIRECTORY = "Processed";
        static string FAILURE_DIRECTORY = "Failed";

...
    if (Regex.IsMatch(FileFullPath, String.Format(@"(.*)\\({0})|({1})$", PROCESSED_DIRECTORY, FAILURE_DIRECTORY)))....

This works fine.

However, I created an additional Regex expression because I am also trying to match the occurance of a file that is located in the Processed or Failed directory. The regex is not matching and I believe it has something to do with the pipe symbol. It matches when I check for either ‘Failed’ or ‘Processed’ without the pipe symbol.

For example: The following files don’t match
– C:\ftp\business\Processed\file.txt
– C:\ftp|business\Failed\file.txt

I would expect them to match.

if (Regex.IsMatch(FileFullPath, String.Format(@"(.*)\\({0}|{1})\\(.*)", PROCESSED_DIRECTORY, FAILURE_DIRECTORY)))

If I somehow could combine the two Regex queries into one to say “Match a path that ends with Failed’ or ‘Processed’ and also match a file that exists in the ‘Failed’ or ‘Processed’ directory”, that’d be amazing. Right now though, I’m content with having two separate regex calls and getting the second to work.

Answer 1

Works ok for me… Ran this in LINQPad:

string PROCESSED_DIRECTORY = "Processed";
string FAILURE_DIRECTORY = "Failed";

string FileFullPath = @"C:\ftp\business\Processed\moof\file.txt";
Regex.IsMatch(FileFullPath, String.Format(@"(.*)\\({0}|{1})\\(.*)", PROCESSED_DIRECTORY, FAILURE_DIRECTORY)).Dump();


FileFullPath = @"C:\ftp|business\Failed\file.txt";
Regex.IsMatch(FileFullPath, String.Format(@"(.*)\\({0}|{1})\\(.*)", PROCESSED_DIRECTORY, FAILURE_DIRECTORY)).Dump();

Here’s a version that will look for either containing the processed/failed strings OR ending in \Processed|Failed\filename.ext:

string PROCESSED_DIRECTORY = "ProcessedPath";
string FAILURE_DIRECTORY = "FailedPath";

string FileFullPath = @"C:\ftp\business\ProcessedPath\moof\file.txt";
Regex.IsMatch(FileFullPath, String.Format(@"((.*)\\({0}|{1})\\(.*))|(.*\\(Processed|Failed)\\(?!.*\\.*))", PROCESSED_DIRECTORY, FAILURE_DIRECTORY)).Dump();

FileFullPath = @"C:\ftp\business\NotTheProcessedPath\moof\Processed\file.txt";
Regex.IsMatch(FileFullPath, String.Format(@"((.*)\\({0}|{1})\\(.*))|(.*\\(Processed|Failed)\\(?!.*\\.*))", PROCESSED_DIRECTORY, FAILURE_DIRECTORY)).Dump();