I notice from my traffic log that there was someone bumping to this blog searching for ‘C# Regex Word Count’. Since I never create such tutorial, so here you go.

The basic rule of a word would be it doesn’t contain any whitespaces (spaces, tabs, or newlines). So the easiest Regex would be:

[^\ ^\t^\n]+

Now to implement it using C#, It would be as follows:

      public int WordCount(String input)
      {
         int result = 0;
         try
         {
            Regex rgx = new Regex(@"[^\\ ^\\t^\\n]+");
            MatchCollection mcMatches = rgx.Matches(input);
            result = mcMatches.Count;            
         }
         catch (Exception ex)
         {
         }
         return result;
      }

An improvement would be putting the Regex creation out of the function, this way we will not re-created the Regex everytime the function is called.

I recently took a trip from my office to Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower using Bus no. 2. As you see on the picture, there is a small lcd screen that indicates the number of seats available on the top-deck. It’s quite neat to save yourself from wasting time looking for available seats by peeking at the top-deck.

From the design of the lower-deck which provides wide spaces, I think this bus is specially designed to cater those on the wheelchair. Which was later confirmed when I saw the wheelchair sign in entrance door. This type of bus is mostly available in routes that serving City area (Chinatown, Orchard, Raffles City). I haven’t seen one in my ulu place (a.k.a. Jurong West):D

Note: ulu is a singlish adjective, very likely taken from Malay language, to describe a place that is so far away from ‘human civilization’ 😀 Well actually, any place in Singapore which is far from Orchard/City area usually labelled as Ulu. 😀

This post is copying the style that is used by Stephen Ostermiller in his article HERE.

Motivation
I am currently creating a RichTextBox control that will format and highlight the SQL string. I notice that the current regex that I used is not match correctly to a certain combination of SQL-style string.

Consider we have the following SQL statement:

First Try
‘.*’

This is incorrect. The regex should only match those within two single-quotes, not expand to the last single-quote.

(After n-Try)
‘.*?[^]’

This should be the correct one.

For those who want to practice their Regular Expression skill, try to download THIS software, it’s free and it’s really good for Regex practice.

Credit goes to Buddie for pointing out this PAGE.

UPDATE (22 Sep 2007)

As it turns out, I totally forgot that SQL-style string doesn’t use ‘ (backslash-quote) but uses ” (quote-quote). So things getting more complicated now.
So we need to change the string into something like this:

Another Try
‘[a-zA-Z ]*(”)*[a-zA-Z ]*’

But if we change the input string into

It becomes

Which is wrong.

Finally
‘([a-zA-Z ]*(”)*)*’

This should be the correct one.