Question

I have a regex where

%word% can occur multiple times, separated by a '<' 

%word% is defined as '.*?'|[a-zA-Z]+ so i wrote

('.*'|[a-zA-Z]+)([<]('.*'|[a-zA-Z]+))* 

Is there any way i can shrink it using capturing groups?

('.*'|[a-zA-Z]+)([<]\1)*,  

But i don’t think \1 can be used as it’d mean repeat the first capture, as i would not know what was captured as it can be a quoted string or a word.

Any thing similar i can use to refer matching the previously written group. I’m working in C#.

Answer 1

As the support is not there yet for the feature, i made a string replacer, where i wrote the specific words i need to replaced by regex using %% and then wrote the program to replace it by the regular expression defined for the text.