string.Format on my regex is giving me spaces in place of curly braces?

Question

My regex after a String.Format(c#):

(^{0})|({0}[-!#$%&'}()+,./:;<=>?@\{{|~"])|([-!#$%&'()*+,./}:;<=>?@_{|~"]{0})|( {0} )

When the regex is coming through the debugger it looks like this:

(^ Word )|( Word [-!#$%&'}()+,./:;<=>?@\{|~"])|([-!#$%&'()*+,./}:;<=>?@_{|~"] Word )|( Word )

The curly braces for my string.format have been replaced with spaces, which obviously breaks my regex. Does anyone know how to solve this problem??

Answer 1

String.Format does not add spaces when it substitutes the value in. My guess is your word is the culprit. Where does it come from? Have you tried trimming it before the format call?

public Regex getExpression(string word)
{
    string baseExpr = @"(^{0})|({0}[-!#$%&'}()+,./:;<=>?@\{{|~""])|([-!#$%&'()*+,./}:;<=>?@_{|~""]{0})|( {0} )";

    return new Regex(string.Format(baseExpr, word.Trim()));
}

You may want to sanitize the word even more to strip out key regex characters.