Question

I want to do something like this, I have a dictionary with keys and values, and a text file like this:

Hello my name is $(Name) and my favorite movie is $(Movie).

I want to read in the file and replace the occurrences of $(…) based on the values in the dictionary, so in this case the dictionary would have a key for Name and Movie.

How would I go about doing this? If I parsed through each word, what would be the regular expression to match $(AnyWord), or would it be better to do something like this:

foreach(var word in file)
{
    if (word.length > 3)
    {
        if (word.substring(0,2)=="$(" && word.substring(word.length-1)==")")
           Lookup word in dictionary 
    }
}

Thanks

Answer 1

Use a MatchEvaluator to do the replacements:

var replacements = new Dictionary<string,string>();
//populate the dictionary
string file = System.IO.File.ReadAllText("filepath");
file = Regex.Replace(file, @"\$\((?<key>[^)]+)\)", new MatchEvaluator(m => replacements.ContainsKey(m.Groups["key"].Value) ? replacements[m.Groups["key"].Value] : m.Value));

If there are any syntax errors I apologize. I’m at work at the moment with no C# compiler so I’ll have to fix them when I get home.