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

You could write your own extension method for string like:

static class StringExtension
        {
            public static bool ContainsWord(this string s, string word)
            {
                string[] ar = s.Split(' ');

                foreach (string str in ar)
                {
                    if (str.ToLower() == word.ToLower())
                        return true;
                }
                return false;
            }
        }

Answer 2

You could split your sentence into words - you could split at each space and then trim any punctuation. Then check if any of these words are 'hi':

var punctuation = source.Where(Char.IsPunctuation).Distinct().ToArray();
var words = sentence.Split().Select(x => x.Trim(punctuation));
var containsHi = words.Contains("hi", StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase);

See a working demo here: https://dotnetfiddle.net/AomXWx

Answer 3

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<string> data = new List<string> {
"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

Answer 4

Try using Regex:

if (Regex.Match(sentence, @"\bhi\b", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Success)
{
    //
};

This works just fine for me on your input text.