Regular Expression group matching

[agent154]

I'm having trouble finding a clear tutorial on how to use regular expressions, and its driving me insane..

However, based on an example I saw, I am trying to construct my own pattern and I cannot figure out why it is not working. Can somebody here give me some help?

I have a string that begins with "Data Source=" and I want to parse the data that comes after the = and before the ; at the end. But I also want to split the string into a path/filename pair (so I can store them in separate variables)

The code I have is as follows, but doesn't match anything.

string data = @"data source=c:\blah\file.ext;some more options=...;";
            string regex = @"data source=(^.*\\)([A-Za-z0-9\-]+\.[A-Za-z0-9]+)$";
            Match asdf = Regex.Match(data, regex, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
            Console.WriteLine(asdf.Groups[1].Value);
            Console.WriteLine(asdf.Groups[2].Value);

[ryuslash]

Ok I have been looking at this regexp for a few minutes now and I don't know a lot about regular expressions, but here's what I think you might want to try:

string regex = @"^data source=(.*\\)([A-Za-z0-9\-]+\.[A-Za-z0-9]+);.*$";

You've got a ^ in your first group, which either says that you want the middle of the string to be at the beginning of the string or that you don't want there to be a .*\\ after data source= and I don't see a ; anywhere in your expression, so since you're looking for just alphanumeric characters after the . (of .ext) up to the end of the string, you won't find it.

you could still leave out the .*$ at the end, since saying that this doesn't have to be found near the end is the same as saying any number of anything up to the end as of here

[agent154]

That worked like a charm. Thanks a ton.