How to check if a string contains substring with wildcard? like abc*xyz

Question

When I parse lines in text file, I want to check if a line contains abc*xyz, where * is a wildcard. abc*xyz is a user input format.

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

3

You can generate Regex and match using it

 searchPattern = "abc*xyz";

 inputText = "SomeTextAndabc*xyz";

 public bool Contains(string searchPattern,string inputText)
  {
    string regexText = WildcardToRegex(searchPattern);
    Regex regex = new Regex(regexText , RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

    if (regex.IsMatch(inputText ))
    {
        return true;
    }
        return false;
 }

public static string WildcardToRegex(string pattern)
{
    return "^" + Regex.Escape(pattern)
                      .Replace(@"\*", ".*")
                      .Replace(@"\?", ".")
               + "$";
}

Here is the source and Here is a similar issue

edited May 23 '17 at 12:33

Community

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1

answered Jul 18 '15 at 11:47

Bakri Bitar

1,543
18
29

Note that you can edit the mehod WildcardToRegex to control the output regex... for example remove the "^" which is used to force the regex to match from the beginning of the input or remove the "$" which does the same but for the end of input – Bakri Bitar Jul 18 '15 at 12:07

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 18 '15 at 11:52

1

If asterisk is the only wildcard character that you wish to allow, you could replace all asterisks with .*?, and use regular expressions:

var filter = "[quick*jumps*lazy dog]";
var parts = filter.Split('*').Select(s => Regex.Escape(s)).ToArray();
var regex = string.Join(".*?", parts);

This produces \[quick.*?jumps.*?lazy\ dog] regex, suitable for matching inputs.

Demo.

answered Jul 18 '15 at 11:52

Sergey Kalinichenko

714,442
84
1,110
1,523

To be able to escape the wildcard itself, you can use escaped splitting like here: https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Tokenize_a_string_with_escaping#C.23 – Niklas Peter Aug 25 '18 at 11:18

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 18 '15 at 11:49

Use Regex

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

            string prefix = "abc";
            string suffix = "xyz";
            string pattern = string.Format("{0}.*{1}", prefix, suffix);

            string input = "abc123456789xyz";

            bool resutls = Regex.IsMatch(input, pattern);
        }
    }
}

How to check if a string contains substring with wildcard? like abc*xyz

3 Answers3