Question

I have written a regex to match section of an SQL Connection string. In the first spec, the Initial Catalog etc. were forced not to contain special characters. So I had

string strConn = "Data Source=VAIOE;Initial Catalog=SomeTextOnlyCatname;Integrated 
    Security=True;Persist Security Info=True;MultipleActiveResultSets=True;Connect Timeout=0;";
Regex databaseNameRegex =
    new Regex(@"(?i)\b(Initial\sCatalog|Database)\b\s?=\s?(\w+\s*)*;?");

Now, I need to match sections which could have names with symbols, punctuation etc. For example

string strConn = "Data Source=VAIOE;Initial Catalog=N3wC@t@l0gName*6Symbols;Integrated 
    Security=True;Persist Security Info=True;MultipleActiveResultSets=True;Connect Timeout=0;";

where I want to return Initial Catalog=N3wC@t@l0gName*6Symbols.

I have tried

Regex databaseNameRegex =
    new Regex(@"(?i)\b(Initial\sCatalog|Database)\b\s?=\s?(\w+\p{P}*\p{M}*\p{Z}*\s*)*;?");

but this fails, due to the presence of semi-colons in the connection string. What is the best regex to deal with this?

Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Can you use SqlConnection to parse the connection string for you and avoid the RegEx? If you just need the data base name, the following should work:

var conn = new SqlConnection(strConn);
Console.WriteLine(conn.Database);

EDIT

A better way to do this was provided by Allon Guralnek – Thanks!

Use SqlConnectionStringBuilder for this – it will extract any information you need.

var connBuilder = new SqlConnectionStringBuilder(strConn);
Console.WriteLine(connBuilder.InitialCatalog);