C# Regular Expression Suggestions when working with C#

Here are some things which an make your working with C# regular expression patterns much easier in reading and processing in C#.

Suggestion 1 – Avoid C# Text Escape Pollution

When working in C# it can become confusing when one has to deal with string literals and escapes even before dealing with the regular expression escapes. For example if we have an escape such as word boundary in regex (\b) we have to escape the escape in C# such as

 

string pattern = "\\b";

That gets confusing because we don’t want have to deal with C#…we are working in regex and \\b does not mean what we think it is (though it gets sent to the parse appropriately). What we should do is use C# literal convention (@) infront of the string such as

 

string pattern = @"\b";

The two shown C# lines are functionally equivalent…but now we can concentrate on the regex pattern with no pollution from C# escapes.

Suggestion 2 - Use Regex Ascii Escapes for quotes

Some people will go out of there way to use double quotes (@” “” “) in C# to search for a double quote in a regex pattern. This is confusing try using the Regex Ascii escape pattern instead. Below is a code sample that is equivalent:

 

string pattern = @""""; // I am only searching for a quote


// VS




string pattern2 = @"\x22″; // Much better