regex to find a word before and after a specific word
//I prefer this style for readability
string pattern = @"(?<before>\w+) text (?<after>\w+)";
string input = "larry text bob fred text ginger fred text barney";
MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(input, pattern);
for (int i = 0; i < matches.Count; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine("before:" + matches[i].Groups["before"].ToString());
Console.WriteLine("after:" + matches[i].Groups["after"].ToString());
}
/* Output:
before:larry
after:bob
before:fred
after:ginger
before:fred
after:barney
*/
EDIT:
If you want to grab all the content from the space before first word to the space after the word use:
(?:\S+\s)?\S*text\S*(?:\s\S+)?
A simple tests:
string input = @"
This is some dummy text to find a word in a string full with text and words
Text is too read
Read my text.
This is a text-field example
this is some dummy [email protected] to read";
var matches = Regex.Matches(
input,
@"(?:\S+\s)?\S*text\S*(?:\s\S+)?",
RegexOptions.IgnoreCase
);
the matches are:
dummy text to with text and Text is my text. a text-field example dummy [email protected] to
/[A-Za-z'-]+ text [A-Za-z'-]+/
Should work in most cases, including hyphenated and compound words.