Regex.Match whole words

Question

In C#, I want to use a regular expression to match any of these words:

string keywords = \"(shoes|shirt|pants)\";

I want to fi

Answer 1

You need a zero-width assertion on either side that the characters before or after the word are not part of the word:

(?=(\W|^))(shoes|shirt|pants)(?!(\W|$))

As others suggested, I think \b will work instead of (?=(\W|^)) and (?!(\W|$)) even when the word is at the beginning or end of the input string, but I'm not sure.