Question

If I have the string hello world , how can I modify the regex world|wo|w so that it will match all of “world”, “wo” and “w” rather than just the single first match of “world” that it comes to ?

If this is not possible directly, is there a good workaround ? I’m using C# if it makes a difference:

Regex testRegex = new Regex("world|wo|w");
MatchCollection theMatches = testRegex.Matches("hello world");
foreach (Match thisMatch in theMatches)
{
   ...
}

Answer 1

I think you’re going to need to use three separate regexs and match on each of them. When you specify alternatives it considers each one a successful match and stops looking after matching one of them. The only way I can see to do it is to repeat the search with each of your alternatives in a separate regex. You can create an array or list of Match items and have each search add to the list if you want to be able to iterate through them later.