Last Updated - Thu Oct 05 2017

Trolling the ASP.NET forums again this morning, I know I do it a lot, I found a question trying to parse the paragraphs out of a series of text. So I knew I had to answer it. The regular expression needed is '(.+)'. This tells the Regular Expression object to match on a series of one or more word related characters. This means it will group matches for a paragraph, indicated by a line or carriage return. Code for this solution would look like this:

public
static
 MatchCollection GetParagraphs(){ using
 (StreamReader sr = new
 StreamReader(@"{Path To Sampel File}\SampleText.txt"
)) { string
 textFromFile = sr.ReadToEnd(); Regex rg = new
 Regex(@"(.+)"
); return
 rg.Matches(textFromFile); }}

I thought I would extend this to get a word count as well as all the words. In this case the expression is '(\w+)'.

public
static
 MatchCollection GetWords(){ using
 (StreamReader sr = new
 StreamReader(@"{Path To Sampel File}\SampleText.txt"
)) { string
 textFromFile = sr.ReadToEnd(); Regex rg = new
 Regex(@"(\w+)"
); return
 rg.Matches(textFromFile); }}

Calling the RegEx.Matches method returns a MatchCollection, which has a Count property, can be used to get the count of matches. It can also be enumerated through to get that actual matches.

public
static
void
 WriteMatchCollectionResults(MatchCollection mc){ Console.WriteLine(mc.Count); foreach
 (Match m in
 mc) { Console.WriteLine(m.Value); } Console.WriteLine("..........................................."
); Console.WriteLine(""
);}

More Fun with Regular Expressions : Word and Paragraph Parsing