Parsing formatted string

Question

I am trying to create a generic formatter/parser combination.

Example scenario:

• I have a string for string.Format(), e.g. var format = \"{0}-{1}\

Answer 1

A simple solution might be to

• replace all format tokens with (.*)
• escape all other special charaters in format
• make the regex match non-greedy

This would resolve the ambiguities to the shortest possible match.

(I'm not good at RegEx, so please correct me, folks :))