Regex 101 Discussion I9 - Count the number of matches.

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Regex 101 Exercise I9 - Count the number of matches

Given a string like:

# # 4 6 # # 7 # 45 # 43 # 65 56 2 # 4345 # # 23

 

Count how many numbers there are in this string

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There are a few ways to approach this problem.

In all of them, we need a way to capture the numeric parts of the string. We've done that before, using something like:

\d+

We can then apply that repeatedly, with code that looks something like this:

Regex regex = new Regex("\d+");

Match match = regex.Match(inputString);int count = 0;

while (match.Success){ count++; match = match.NextMatch();}

That's a bit ugly, however. There's a shortcut, however, using:

MatchCollection matches = regex.Matches(inputString);int count = matches.Count;

That gives the same result.

There's another, more "advanced" approach we can use. The regex is more complex, and the code that you write is harder to understand, so I probably wouldn't prefer it over the last approach.

To use it, you need to know a new piece of information about the Match class (where "new" means "something I haven't talked about").

In earlier examples, we used the "Groups" indexer to pull out values that we had captured. So, if we wrote something like:

(?<Digits>\d+)

We would use:

match.Groups["Digits"].Value

to get the string.

It is possible to write a regex in which a given capture is used more that one time, and therefore corresponds to multiple strings. If we write:

( # Start up repeating section (?<Digits>\d+) # a sequence of digits

(\D+|$) # not digits or end

)+ # repeat match

We have a single regex that will match a repeating series of digits follow by non-digits, and each match is stored using the "Digits" capture.

To get at these captures, we use:

match.Captures["Digits"]

which is a collection of captures, with each one containing the value from one of the captures. To solve our problem, we'd be interested in the length, which is:

match.Captures["Digits"].Length

If you want extra credit, you can also do this by using Regex.Split(), though I've found that Regex.Match() is easier to use for this sort of problem.