Question

In C#, I want to use a regular expression to match any of these words:

string keywords = "(shoes|shirt|pants)";

I want to find the whole words in the content string. I thought this regex would do that:

if (Regex.Match(content, keywords + "\\s+", 
  RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Success)
{
    //matched
}

but it returns true for words like participants, even though I only want the whole word pants.

How do I match only those literal words?

Answer 1

You should add the word delimiter to your regex:

\b(shoes|shirt|pants)\b

In code:

Regex.Match(content, @"\b(shoes|shirt|pants)\b");