c# Regex: find placeholders as substring

Question

i have following string.

"hello [#NAME#]. nice to meet you. I heard about you via [#SOURCE#]."

in above text i have two place holders. NAME and SOURCE

i want to extract these sub string using Reg Ex.

what would be the reg ex pattern to find list of these place holders.

i tried

string pattern = @"\[#(\w+)#\]";

result

hello  
NAME 
. nice to meet you. I heard about you via  
SOURCE 
.

what i want is only

NAME
SOURCE

Sample code

string tex = "hello [#NAME#]. nice to meet you. I heard about you via [#SOURCE#]."; 

    string pattern = @"\[#(\w+)#\]";

    var sp = Regex.Split(tex, pattern);

    sp.Dump();

Answer 1

Your regex is working correctly. That's, how Regex.Split() should behave (see the doc). If what you said is really what you want, you can use something like:

var matches = from Match match in Regex.Matches(text, pattern)
              select match.Groups[1].Value;

If, on the other hand, you wanted to replace the placeholders using some rules (e.g. using a Dictionary<string, string>), then you could do:

Regex.Replace(text, pattern, m => substitutions[m.Groups[1].Value]);