Question

I’m at a loss, I need some help.

The string looks like:

"Hello World

@start some text @end

@start more text @end"

I need a regex pattern which will match anything from @start to the first @end. In this example, we would have two matches (@start (some text) @end). The text inside of the @ tags could contain a newline character.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

This code:

string s = "Hello world\n@start text1 @end\n@start text2 @end";
Regex r = new Regex(@"(?<=@start)[\s\S]*?(?=@end)");
var mm = r.Matches(s);

produced 2 matches.

The tricks are:

• use non-greedy matching (*? instead of just *)
• use [\s\S] to match really any character, including newline
• use lookahead/lookbehind ((?...))