Regular Expression Basics

One of the most common regular expression operators is a quantifier. ? is a quantifier that matches the preceding item 0 or 1 time. In other words, ? means optional. An item is either a single character or a complex structure of characters in square brackets. For example, the regular expression "colou?r" matches color and colour, but not colouur:

Console.WriteLine (Regex.Match ("color",   @"colou?r").Success);  // True
Console.WriteLine (Regex.Match ("colour",  @"colou?r").Success);  // True
Console.WriteLine (Regex.Match ("colouur", @"colou?r").Success);  // False

Regex.Match searches within a larger string. The object that it returns has properties for the Index and Length of the match, as well as the actual Value matched: