How Can I Use Regex in C# to Match Whole Words Only?

Use regular expression to match complete words in C#

In programming, it is often necessary to extract specific words from a string. In C#, regular expressions (Regex) provide a powerful tool for such tasks. However, matching whole words can be tricky if you don't think about it.

Consider the following scenario: You have a clothing store website and you want to match words related to clothing, such as "shoes", "shirt" or "pants". You wrote a regular expression:

<code>string keywords = "(shoes|shirt|pants)";</code>

And try to find these words in the content string using the following code:

<code>Regex.Match(content, keywords + "\s+",
  RegexOptions.Singleline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Success</code>

However, this regex incorrectly matches "participants" because it contains "pants" as a substring. To match only exact words, be sure to use word separators, represented by \b.

The modified regular expression becomes:

<code>\b(shoes|shirt|pants)\b</code>

By adding word separators, the regex now expects matched words to be preceded and followed by spaces, punctuation, or the beginning/end of a string. In code, this modified expression would be:

<code>Regex.Match(content, @"\b(shoes|shirt|pants)\b");</code>

With this modification, the regex will only match the literal words "shoes", "shirt" and "pants" in the content string.

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