正则表达式搜索一个字母开头的单词和包含另一个单词的下一个单词

Question

How might I search through a list of names and only return the names that have a word starting with 's' and the next word starting with 'mary'?

For example, I have 2 titles: "Avera St. Mary's Hospital" and "Arthritis Care Specialists of Maryland". I search 'S Mary' and would like it to return "Avera St. Mary's Hospital" not "Arthritis Care Specialists of Maryland". My code returns both...Any help would be much appreciated!

var testList = new List<string>();
List<string> titles = new List<string>();
titles.Add("Avera St. Mary's Hospital");
titles.Add("Arthritis Care Specialists of Maryland");
foreach (var title in titles)
{
    var pattern = @"(?<!\w)s.*\smary";
    Regex r = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
    Match m = r.Match(title);
    if (m.Success)
    {
        testList.Add(title);
    }
}

Answer 1

You need to change your regular expression like:

var pattern = @"(?<!\\w)s\\w+[-| |~|@|(|)|.]*[\\s]+Mary";`

[-|`|~|@|(|)|.] specifies the special characters allowed between S* and Mary like St- Mary

Answer 2

Put a \\b — which means word boundary after mary .

demo

Answer 3

The .* is the problem within the regular expression given in the question. That .* matches too much text. (Changing it to a non-greedy .*? will not work.)

From the question and additional example in comments, the match should be of:

• A word starting with s . The definition of "word" is not precise but using "any characters that are not spaces" matches the examples.
• A separator between two words. Assume that one or more spaces is allowed.
• A word starting with the letters mary . Anything may follow these four characters.

This leads to the simple regular expression: \\bs[^ ]* +mary

\b               A word boundary
s                This exact character
[^ ]*            Zero or more characters that are not spaces
 +               One or more spaces
mary             These exact characters

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Combining and sorting the examples in the question and the comments gives these as example that should match:

Avera St. Mary's Hospital
Carondelet St. Mary's Hospital.
Centre Hospitalier St- Mary,
saint mary,
Saint Mary's Home of Erie,
st mary
st mary's
st. mary,

These are example that should not match:

Arthritis Care Specialists of Maryland
Cardiovascular Specialists Of Central Maryland,