Tonight’s quiz:
How to see if ‘foo’ is a unique entry in comma-separated list ‘foo,bar,foobar,foo,foo’?
We want to match the ‘foo’ at the beginning, at the end, and also in the middle, but not as part of the word ‘foobar.’ Also the comma-separated list might only be ‘foo’.
First attempt:
[^,]foo[$,]
Plain wrong, because ^ means something different inside a set
Second attempt:
^foo$|^foo,|,foo,|,foo$
Works, but clunky.
Third attempt:
bfoob
Works perfectly. Especially when you remember to escape the ” in your .NET string assignment 🙁
Thanks to the Rad Software Regular Expression Designer too!