How Can I Replace Whole Words in a String While Preserving Partial Word Matches?

Preserving Word Integrity with String Replacement

In programming, the need often arises to replace specific words or phrases within a string. However, when dealing with text containing partial word matches, it's crucial to maintain the integrity of whole words. Here's how to achieve this using String.Replace with a twist.

To replace only whole words, a regular expression (regex) approach is the most effective. Regex provides the ability to match specific patterns within a string.

Let's consider the following example:

"test, and test but not testing.  But yes to test".Replace("test", "text")

The desired output is:

"text, and text but not testing.  But yes to text"

To accomplish this, create a regex pattern that matches the word "test" as a whole word. This can be achieved using word boundaries, represented by the b metacharacter. Here is the modified regex pattern:

\btest\b

The complete C# code using the regex approach:

string input = "test, and test but not testing.  But yes to test";
string pattern = @"\btest\b";
string replace = "text";
string result = Regex.Replace(input, pattern, replace);
Console.WriteLine(result);

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