Question

I’m trying to group the following string into three groups.

0:0:Awesome:awesome

That being "0", "0" and "Awesome:awesome"

Using this regular expression:

^([0-9]+)\:([0-9]*)\:(.*)$

It works fine on online regex services: http://rubular.com/r/QePxt57EwU

But it seems like .NET doesn’t agree.
Picture of Regex problem from Visual Studio http://xs.to/image-3F8A_4BA916BD.jpg

Answer 1

The MatchCollection contains the results of applying the regular expression to the source string iteratively. In your case there is only 1 match – so the results are correct. What you have are multiple captures within the match. This is what you want to compare against – not the number of matches.

MatchCollection matches = RegEx.Matches("0:0:Awesome:awesome",
                                        "^([0-9]+)\:([0-9]*)\:(.*)$");

if( matches.Count != 1 && matches[0].Captures.Count != 3 )
  //...