Question

The problem is this:

I want to find a regex in a textfile and get the complete block of text

Text example:

text text text text text text text text text 
!
title
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text 
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text 
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text 
!
text text text text text text text text text 

finding the “title” part is easy but I want to get the following result:

title
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text 
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text 
text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text 

What is the best way to go? Working with a regex pattern or selecting the text until I get a “!”? (I want to have simple/fast readable code)

Code for finding a pattern: (with rtxtText as the richtextbox)

    private String searchInfo(String pattern)
    {
        String text = rtxtText.Text;
        Regex regExp = new Regex(pattern);
        String result = "";

        foreach (Match match in regExp.Matches(text))
        {
            result += "\n" + match.ToString();
        }
        return result; 
    }

Answer 1

Your Regex be changed to contain the unknown characters as well, like

• first title

• then [^!]* ([^ ] means something not in this set, so [^!]* is everything except ! in any number)

  Regex regex = new Regex(“title[^!]*”, RegexOptions.SingleLine);
  MatcheCollection matches = regex.Matches(text);