VBScript Find Multiple Words with One Search

From Regex Regular Expression Encyclopedia

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

Dim fso,s,re,line,lineNbr
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set s = fso.OpenTextFile(WScript.Arguments.Item(0), 1, True)
Set re = New RegExp
re.Pattern = "\s+(moo|oink)\s+"
lineNbr = 0
Do While Not s.AtEndOfStream
    line = s.ReadLine()
    lineNbr = lineNbr + 1
    If re.Test(line) Then
        WScript.Echo "Found match: '" & line & "' at line " & lineNbr
    End If
Loop
s.Close

[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:

[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.