Question

I need to insert a word after every X (i.e. 4,5,6 etc) sentences in given text. I feel regex would be compact and good solution. To be specific, I need to do this in .net.

Thanks,

Mihir

(If regex can’t identify some sentences ending with not so common punctuation, I am fine with it. I don’t need 100% accuracy)

Answer 1

You can only do it with the Regex in .NET if you find a match and loop through the string as long as you find new matches. Of course this is no regex-only implementation:

string word = "WORD"; // Your word
string sentence = "1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10."; // Your sentence
long count = 0;
int xSentence = 3; // Numbers of sentence
int pos = 0;

// Your Regex
Regex reg = new Regex(@"[\.,\!,\?]", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
Match mat = reg.Match(sentence);

// While there is a new match
while (mat.Success)
{
    count++;
    if (count % xSentence == 0)
    {
        // +1 to insert the word after punctuation
        pos = mat.Index + 1;

        sentence = sentence.Insert(pos, word);
        mat = reg.Match(sentence, pos);
    }
    else
    {
        mat = mat.NextMatch();
    }
}

Maybe this woul help you implementing it in .NET although there are several other ways to do it.