I'm trying to create a Regex expression in vb.net that includes the search term in the result (or have some way of finding which term was found).

For example, with these 2 sentences:

hello Sailor my name is Bill

hello Soldier my name is Bill

I can use this expression to look for either 'Sailor' or 'Soldier':

(?<=Sailor |Soldier ). ?(?= Bill)

... and this gives me:

my name is

Which is the result I want, but I also need to know whether it matched on 'Sailor' or 'Soldier'. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!

CodePudding user response：

Sorry, found it when I did some tinkering. I just need this expression:

(?=Sailor |Soldier ). ?(?= Bill)

i.e. drop the < symbol from the start term.

CodePudding user response：

It is not necessary to first assert Sailor and Soldier using a lookahead and then matching them.

You can match them immediately, and perhaps add some word boundaries to prevent partial word matches:

\b(?:Sailor|Soldier) . ?(?= Bill)\b