I have a string that I am trying to create a regular expression to match the assignment name "People" and its list of people

People = "Alice", "Bob", "Charlie", "David", "Erica", "Fred";

Conditions:

• The expression name "People" must be returned
• Any number of names must be returned separately (in groups)

I have looked to see if I could find something similar Match list of words without the list of chars around But I am not sure if this is the correct thing, or how to apply it.

The Regex expression I have tried

( \"([A-Z0-9] )\",?)

This seems to match all of the individual names, however I am not sure how I can retrieve "People" in a separate group.

Is this a case for lookaround expressions in Regex? If so, how can it be implemented?

CodePudding user response：

You could make the pattern even more specific, but in this case you might use the CapturesCollection in C# by using a repeated capture group:

\b(?<name>[A-Za-z0-9] )\s*=\s*(?:\"(?<people>[A-Za-z0-9] )\",?\s*) ;

Regex demo | C# demo

Example to get the values:

string pattern = @"\b(?<name>[A-Za-z0-9] )\s*=\s*(?:\""(?<people>[A-Za-z0-9] )\"",?\s*) ;";
string input = @"People = ""Alice"", ""Bob"", ""Charlie"", ""David"", ""Erica"", ""Fred"";";
Match match = Regex.Match(input, pattern);
var name = match.Groups["name"].Value;
var strings = match.Groups["people"].Captures.Select(c => c.Value);

Console.WriteLine(name);

foreach (String s in strings)
{
    Console.WriteLine("-> "  s);
}

Output

People
-> Alice
-> Bob
-> Charlie
-> David
-> Erica
-> Fred