How to match text inside brackets with regex in c#?

Question

I have following text

has helped discover and mentor such </br>
New York Times bestselling authors as Brandon Sanderson  </br>
(Mistborn), James Dashner (The Maze Runner), and Stephenie

I am taking last 3 words of first line and first 3 words of last line to find in between text by using regex. I am using following regex in c# code.

string matchedText = "";
string RegexPattren = preLine + "[\\w\\W\\S\\s\\s\\D':;\"<>,.?]*" + postLine;
matchedText = Regex.Match(stBuilder.ToString(), RegexPattren).Value;
matchedText = preLine.Equals("") ? matchedText : matchedText.Replace(preLine, "");
matchedText = postLine.Equals("") ? matchedText : matchedText.Replace(postLine, "");
string[] MatchedLines = Regex.Split(matchedText, "</br>").Where(x => !string.IsNullOrEmpty(x.Trim())).ToArray();



string RegexPattren = preLine + "[\\w\\W\\S\\s\\s\\D':;\"<>,.?]*" + postLine;

which has followig values

and mentor such [\w\W\S\s\s\D':;"<>,.?]* James Dashner

Above code is working fine and matched result is

and mentor such  </br>New York Times bestselling authors as Brandon Sanderson  </br>(Mistborn), James Dashner

Problem occurs when words with brackets are found just like below, regex is not matching any text.

and mentor such [\w\W\S\s\s\D':;"<>,.?]* (Mistborn), James Dashner

How to match line which has text inside brackets before or after regex pattern in c# ?

Answer 1

You'll have to escape the parenthesis like

and mentor such [\w\W\S\s':;"<>,.?]*\(Mistborn\), James Dashner

That'll make it match the literal ( and ) .

And note that your regex had a space before (Mistborn) which doesn't exist in the text. It's preceded by a newline. I removed the space, but you could also change it to a \\s , which matches both space and newline.

And lastly, \\D matches non numeric, which already is handled by \\W since numbers are matched by \\w . Actually, several of the characters in the class could be removed. If you set the RegexOptions.Singleline you would probably be OK with

and mentor such .*\(Mistborn\), James Dashner

Check it out here at regex101 .

PS. There's a .NET method to escape regex'es, Regex.Escape , but that complicates having actual regex patterns in there.