Question

I thought I understood C# regular expressions, but clearly it’s not the case. I need some help devising an expression that would find everything from START|BEGIN until )). Expression can be multi line.

Ex.

START( FTP_STATE, XXX(    VAL( FTP_INITIAL_STATE, 0 )    VAL( FTP_INBOUND,       1 )    AL( FTP_OUTBOUND,      2 ) ))  /**************************************************************/  BEGIN( FTP_TIMER_MODE, YYY(    VAL( FTP_REMOVE_TIMER,     0 )    VAL( FTP_NOT_REMOVE_TIMER, 1 ) ))  /**************************************************************/ 

Any help greatly appreciated

Answer 1

Try this:

(?:START|BEGIN)(?:[^)]+|\)[^)])+\)\) 

To explain it:

• (?:START|BEGIN)   Start with either START or BEGIN.
• (?:[^)]+|\)[^)])+    After that either any character other than a ) ([^)]+) or a ) that is followed by any character other than ) (\)[^)]) may follow. (So there is no way to match )) with this expression.)
• \)\)   Finally the )).

I hope this will reduce backtracking.