.NET equivalent to Perl regular expressions

Question

I need to convert a Perl script to VB.NET. I have managed almost the entire conversion, but some Perl (seemingly simple) regex are causing an headache. Can someone suggest me .NET equivalent of the following perl regex:

1)

$letter =~ s/Users //,;
$letter =~ s/Mailboxes //,;
if($letter =~ m/$first_char/i){

2)

unless($storegroup =~ /Recovery/ || $storegroup =~ /Users U V W X Y Z/ || $storegroup =~ /Users S T/
    || $storegroup =~ /Users Q R/){

The regex look simple to me. I tried to wade through perl.org but understanding a langugae regex takes sometime and I need to complete the conversion quickly.

Answer 1

In Perl, you can think of the slashes as something like double-quotes with the added meaning of "between these slashes is a regex-string". The first block of code is a Perl find/replace regex:

$stringvar =~ s/findregex/replaceregex/;

Takes findregex and replaces it with replaceregex, in-place. The given example is a very simple search, and the .net Regex class would be overkill. String.Replace() method will do the job:

letter = letter.Replace("Users ", "")
letter = letter.Replace("Mailboxes ", "")

The second part is Perl for find only, returns true if the findregex string is found, leaves the actual string itself untouched.

$stringvar =~ /findregex/;

String.Contains() can handle this in .net:

if (!(storegroup.Contains("Recovery") _
   or storegroup.Contains("Users U V W X Y Z") _
   or storegroup.Contains("you get the idea"))) Then 
    ...

(sorry if my VB is a little rusty, but hope this helps)

Answer 2

$letter =~ s/Users //,;
$letter =~ s/Mailboxes //,;
if($letter =~ m/$first_char/i){

-->

letter = letter.Replace("Users ", "");
letter = letter.Replace("Mailboxes ", "");
//next one depends on what $first_char is

and

unless($storegroup =~ /Recovery/ || $storegroup =~ /Users U V W X Y Z/ || $storegroup =~ /Users S T/
|| $storegroup =~ /Users Q R/){

-->

if (!(storegroup.Contains("Recovery") || storegroup.Contains("Users U V W X Y Z") ...and so on...))

Only reason to use regex here is because Perl is super good at regex :)