Translate Perl regular expressions to .NET

Question

I have some useful regular expressions in Perl. Is there a simple way to translate them to .NET\'s dialect of regular expressions?

If not, is there a concise referen

Answer 1

They were designed to be compatible with Perl 5 regexes. As such, Perl 5 regexes should just work in .NET.

You can translate some RegexOptions as follows:

[Flags]
public enum RegexOptions
{
  Compiled = 8,
  CultureInvariant = 0x200,
  ECMAScript = 0x100,
  ExplicitCapture = 4,
  IgnoreCase = 1,                 // i in Perl
  IgnorePatternWhitespace = 0x20, // x in Perl
  Multiline = 2,                  // m in Perl
  None = 0,
  RightToLeft = 0x40,
  Singleline = 0x10               // s in Perl
}

Another tip is to use verbatim strings so that you don't need to escape all those escape characters in C#:

string badOnTheEyesRx    = "\\d{4}/\\d{2}/\\d{2}";
string easierOnTheEyesRx = @"\d{4}/\d{2}/\d{2}";