ASP.NET Find Multiple Words with One Search

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You can use this recipe for finding one of a list of words in a line. This recipe assumes both words are whole words surrounded by whitespace and that the list is a short one containing the words moo and oink.

[edit] code

<%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" %>
<%@ Page Language="vb" AutoEventWireup="false" %>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head><title></title>
</head>
<body>
    <form Id="Form1" RunAt="server">
    <asp:TextBox id="txtInput" runat="server"></asp:TextBox>
    <asp:RegularExpressionValidator Id="revInput" RunAt="server"
        ControlToValidate="txtInput"
        ErrorMessage="Please enter a valid value"
        ValidationExpression=".*\s+(moo|oink)\s+.*">
    </asp:RegularExpressionValidator>
    <asp:Button Id="btnSubmit" RunAt="server" CausesValidation="True"
        Text="Submit"></asp:Button>
    </form>
</body>
</html>

[edit] How It Works

A special character class, \b, allows you to easily search for whole words. This is an advantage because without doing a whole bunch of extra work you can make sure that a search for some- thing, for example, doesn’t yield unexpected matches such as somethings. You can break the regular expression shown here into the following:

Regular Expression Description
\s whitespace . . .
+ found one or more times . . .
(...) followed by something . . .
\s followed by whitespace . . .
+ that occurs one or more times.
The something here is another expression, moo|oink. This expression is as follows:
m an m, followed by . . .
o an o, then . . .
o an o . . .
or...
o an o, followed by . . .
i an i, then . . .
n an n, followed by...
k a k.

[edit] Variations

A useful variation of this recipe is to replace the \s+ combination, which matches specifically whitespace, with the word boundary character class \b.

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