Capturing “xxxxxxxxxx”

Question

This is a pretty simple question but I'm somewhat stumped.

I am capturing sections of text that match "xxxxxxxxxx". It works fine.

string pattern = "(?<quotePair>\"[^/\"]*\")";

Now I want to make a new pattern to capture “xxxxxxxxxx”... I used:

string pattern2 = "(?<lrquotePair>“[^/\"“]*”)";

For some reason the second pattern won't catch anything. What am I missing?

Answer 1

Encoding might be getting in your way. Try with \u0093 and \u0094 instead.

Answer 2

There's nothing wrong with your second regex. Are you sure the input string is correct? The characters you're trying to match are not plain ASCII, so maybe there's a problem with a character encoding mismatch.

Answer 3

Your patterns are more complicated than how you describe them - for example, the first one won't match "foo/bar", and the second one won't match “foo/bar” or “foo"bar”. Perhaps your input falls into one of those categories?

If there is an encoding problem, it's not with the regex - .NET regexes support Unicode just fine. But it might be that you didn't read the text in the correct encoding in the first place - try printing it out and check that the fancy “” quotes are still there. In particular, if you use StreamReader class with a single-argument constructor (or File.OpenText helper), it defaults to UTF-8 encoding for input, which might not be what you actually have there.