Find all substrings between two strings

Question

I need to get all substrings from string.
For ex:

StringParser.GetSubstrings("[start]aaaaaa[end] wwwww [start]cccccc[end]", "[start]", "[end]");

that returns 2 string "aaaaaa" and "cccccc" Suppose we have only one level of nesting. Not sure about regexp, but I think it will be userful.

Answer 1

Here's a solution that doesn't use regular expressions and doesn't take nesting into consideration.

public static IEnumerable<string> EnclosedStrings(
    this string s, 
    string begin, 
    string end)
{
    int beginPos = s.IndexOf(begin, 0);
    while (beginPos >= 0)
    {
        int start = beginPos + begin.Length;
        int stop = s.IndexOf(end, start);
        if (stop < 0)
            yield break;
        yield return s.Substring(start, stop - start);
        beginPos = s.IndexOf(begin, stop+end.Length);
    }           
}

Answer 2

private IEnumerable<string> GetSubStrings(string input, string start, string end)
{
    Regex r = new Regex(Regex.Escape(start) + "(.*?)" + Regex.Escape(end));
    MatchCollection matches = r.Matches(input);
    foreach (Match match in matches)
        yield return match.Groups[1].Value;
}