Regex to include and exclude by multi characters

Question

I have a string where i want to remove anything with negative values for example,

var mystring = "+colour:black +year:2015 -model:golf";

I tried using following regex but it doesn't work.

var reg = "[+A-z:0-9]";

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 23 '15 at 12:02

You can use

var result = Regex.Replace(mystring, @"\s*[-][^\s]*\s*", string.Empty);

For only positive values:

var result = Regex.Replace(mystring, @"\s*[+][^\s]*\s*", string.Empty);

For both positive and negative:

var result = Regex.Replace(mystring, @"\s*[+-][^\s]*\s*", string.Empty);

This way, you will also handle any stray hyphens with no characters but whitespace after them, and with \s* you will trim the output string from remanining spaces.

Notes on the regex: [-+] matches either - or + once, \s* matches 0 or more whitespace, and [^\s]* matches 0 or more characters other than whitespace.

See demo

Note that `[A-z]` matches not only letters but some non-letters, too. See [A-z and a-zA-Z difference](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4923380/difference-between-regex-a-z-and-a-za-z). — Wiktor Stribiżew, Jul 23 '15 at 12:22

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 23 '15 at 11:58

1

-\S+

Would do the same for you.

or

-[a-zA-Z0-9:]+

answered Jul 23 '15 at 11:58

vks

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Thank you for reply, how can i take only the positive ? – CodeBox Jul 23 '15 at 12:02
@CodeBox for only `positive` use ` `[+][a-zA-Z0-9:]+` – vks Jul 23 '15 at 12:03

Regex to include and exclude by multi characters

2 Answers2