Archive for 17th February 2013

.NET regex to find strings inside curly braces

Regular expressions all by themselves have the magical ability to amaze and confound all at the same time. Throw in a dash of .NET string interpretation and you have a recipe for pulling out the remaining hair that you might have on your head.

So I was trying to use a regex to do some searching inside of a large string for strings inside curly braces, such as {this} and {these three words}. My string matching routine would return “this” and “these three words”, without the quotes of course. It took a bit of trial and error, but here is the important stuff for the routine that I put together to accomplish this task:

const string pattern = @"\{([^\}]+)\}";
foreach (Match match in Regex.Matches(theLargeString, pattern))
{
    Console.WriteLine("Found a field match: " + match);
}

BTW, a special birthday shout out to one of the mega stars of our generation, who turns 50 years young today. Happy birthday, Larry The Cable Guy.