Regular expression for a single word

Question

I am using Regex.Split to split a SQL script on the keyword "GO". My problem here is that I cannot seem to get my head around how to get the Regex to do the split. My regex expression also splits on "GO" even if it's in a SQL statement like:

Insert into  x(a,b) values(‘please go get some text’,’abc’)

But I only want it to split on the keyword "GO". Any suggestions?

EDIT: I am using c#. at the moment my regex is simply:

  foreach (string batch in Regex.Split(script, "\\bGO\\b", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase))
  {
    yield return batch;
  }

Answer 1

This is pretty much impossible without implementing a complete SQL parser (which you probably do not want to do), in the really correct way.

An alternative would be to resort to some hacks (i.e. ignore sections of the text that are within quotes), but this will still not work if your SQL contains the text 'GO' at some other place, e.g. 'SELECT * FROM GO'.

Answer 2

You could search for "go" on a line by itself. Not guaranteed to always work, but more likely to work.

Answer 3

Split on GOs on a line by themselves, like:

foreach (string batch in Regex.Split(script, "^GO$\\n", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Multiline))
{
    yield return batch;
}

Depending on where your script is coming from you may need to change that to "^GO$\\r\\n"

Answer 4

You could try something like

/;\s*GO\s*;/i

With that you'll be covering every GO sentence, independently if they are in just one line or not (i.e. semi-colons in other lines).

If you're using queries for further execution, the you might want to add the semi-colon back to each query.

Be warned that if an occurrence of "; GO;" happens inside an insert string, then there's no way to achieve your goal without a proper SQL parser.