Question

I need to create a regex that can match multiple strings. For example, I want to find all the instances of ‘good’ or ‘great’. I found some examples, but what I came up with doesn’t seem to work:

\b(good|great)\w*\b 

Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Edit: I should note that I don’t want to just match whole words. For example, I may want to match ‘ood’ or ‘reat’ as well (parts of the words).

Edit 2: Here is some sample text: ‘This is a really great story.’ I might want to match ‘this’ or ‘really’, or I might want to match ‘eall’ or ‘reat’.

Answer 1

If you can guarantee that there are no reserved regex characters in your word list (or if you escape them), you could just use this code to make a big word list into @'(a|big|word|list)'. There’s nothing wrong with the | operator as you’re using it, as long as those () surround it. It sounds like the \w* and the \b patterns are what are interfering with your matches.

String[] pattern_list = whatever; String regex = String.Format('({0})', String.Join('|', pattern_list));