Get only Whole Words from a .Contains() statement

Question

I\'ve used .Contains() to find if a sentence contains a specific word however I found something weird:

I wanted to find if the word "hi" was present in a se

Answer 1

Here's a Regex solution:

Regex has a Word Boundary Anchor using \b

Also, if the search string might come from user input, you might consider escaping the string using Regex.Escape

This example should filter a list of strings the way you want.

string findme = "hi";

string pattern = @"\b" + Regex.Escape(findme) + @"\b";

Regex re = new Regex(pattern,RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);

List data = new List {
"The child wanted to play in the mud",
"Hi there",
"Hector had a hip problem"
};

var filtered = data.Where(d => re.IsMatch(d));

DotNetFiddle Example