This is what I would do if you're making a command line tool. You could write the command line tool in C#/.NET and that will give you access to these APIs natively.

It is most likely the best way to do what I want to do, but I'll have to check with my teacher if it's ok with him (or if he wanted us to explore Regex only). What he asked was to highlight keywords. Quotes and comments were bonuses... and I want to explore further and resolve bonuses lol.

You can't complete the assignment fully with quotes and comments with a regular expression. If your teacher says otherwise, tell him/her to read up on ambiguous grammars

This post was edited by Klexmoo on Apr 1 2019 12:07pm

Oh I have no doubt he knows that, he's one of the 10 Canadians part of the C++ language committee, so he's far from being a dumbass haha. We can choose whatever technology we want (as long as it's a technology we never really looked into) and I just thought it was possible to complete 100% of the assignment with mostly Regex, but apparently it isn't haha.

This post was edited by Access on Apr 1 2019 04:44pm

I bet you will get major bonus points by using Roslyn for it then

if the element 'result' is found, you found what you needed.

Keep in mind this does work with //'s and with /* */'s, and with double and single qoutes...
Depending on the engine, this might not work with multi line /* comment blocks.

Oh, i guess this is a bit redundant to say so, but "whatyousearchfor" can be a regex ofc


But srsly dude, get a parser.

so you have a word foo that you want to find within a given code in C#, but the word itself should not be within quotes or comments?

Does it need to be one regex? Or could you filter for results in multiple steps?

So if you want to find the word foo only the second example should be found?



If stuff like example 8 can be persistent within the code it is in my opinion not doable with just one regular expression as the word foo could be within the quotes or outside - the full context here matters