Match at every second occurrence

If you're using C#, you can either get all the matches at once (i.e. use Regex.Matches(), which returns a MatchCollection, and check the index of the item: index % 2 != 0).

If you want to find the occurrence to replace it, use one of the overloads of Regex.Replace() that uses a MatchEvaluator (e.g. Regex.Replace(String, String, MatchEvaluator). Here's the code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string input = "abcdabcd";

            // Replace *second* a with m

            string replacedString = Regex.Replace(
                input,
                "a",
                new SecondOccuranceFinder("m").MatchEvaluator);

            Console.WriteLine(replacedString);
            Console.Read();

        }

        class SecondOccuranceFinder
        {
            public SecondOccuranceFinder(string replaceWith)
            {
                _replaceWith = replaceWith;
                _matchEvaluator = new MatchEvaluator(IsSecondOccurance);
            }

            private string _replaceWith;

            private MatchEvaluator _matchEvaluator;
            public MatchEvaluator MatchEvaluator
            {
                get
                {
                    return _matchEvaluator;
                }
            }

            private int _matchIndex;
            public string IsSecondOccurance(Match m)
            {
                _matchIndex++;
                if (_matchIndex % 2 == 0)
                    return _replaceWith;
                else
                    return m.Value;
            }
        }
    }
}

Would something like

(pattern.*?(pattern))*

work for you?

Edit:

The problem with this is that it uses the non-greedy operator *?, which can require an awful lot of backtracking along the string instead of just looking at each letter once. What this means for you is that this could be slow for large gaps.

Suppose the pattern you want is abc+d. You want to match the second occurrence of this pattern in a string.

You would construct the following regex:

abc+d.*?(abc+d)

This would match strings of the form: <your-pattern>...<your-pattern>. Since we're using the reluctant qualifier *? we're safe that there cannot be another match of between the two. Using matcher groups which pretty much all regex implementations provide you would then retrieve the string in the bracketed group which is what you want.

Use grouping.

foo.*?(foo)