C# Regex to match the word with dot

Question

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" is an English-language pangram, alphabet! that is, a phrase that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. It has been used to test typewriters alphabet. and computer keyboards, and in other applications involving all of the letters in the English alphabet.

I need to get the "alphabet." word in regex. In the above text there are 3 instances. It should not include "alphabet!". I just tried regex with

 MatchCollection match = Regex.Matches(entireText, "alphabet."); 

but this returns 4 instances including "alphabet!". How to omit this and get only "alphabet."

Answer 1

. is a special character in regex, that matches anything. Try escaping it:

 MatchCollection match = Regex.Matches(entireText, @"alphabet\.");

Answer 2

. is a special character in regular expressions. You need to escape it with a slash first:

Regex.Matches(entireText, "alphabet\\.")

The slash ends up being double because \\ inside a string must in turn be escaped with another slash.

Answer 3

"." has special meaning in Regular expressions. Escape it to match the period

MatchCollection match = Regex.Matches(entireText, @"alphabet\.");

Edit:

Full code, giving expected result:

        string entireText = @"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is an English-language pangram, alphabet! that is, a phrase that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. It has been used to test typewriters alphabet. and computer keyboards, and in other applications involving all of the letters in the English alphabet.";
        MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(entireText, @"alphabet\.");
        foreach (Match match in matches)
        {
            foreach (Group group in match.Groups)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(group);
            }
        }