Static “Convenience” Functions

As we saw in the “Regex Quickstart” beginning on page 413, you don’t always have to create explicit Regex objects. The following static functions allow you to apply with regular expressions directly:

Regex.IsMatch(target, pattern)
Regex.IsMatch(target, pattern, options)

Regex.Match(target, pattern)
Regex.Match(target, pattern, options)

Regex.Matches(target, pattern)
Regex.Matches(target, pattern, options)

Regex.Replace(target, pattern, replacement)
Regex.Replace(target, pattern, replacement, options)

Regex.Matches(target, pattern)
Regex.Matches(target, pattern, options)

Internally, these are just wrappers around the core Regex constructor and methods we’ve already seen. They construct a temporary Regex object for you, use it to call the method you’ve requested, and then throw the object away. (Well, they don’t actually throw it away—more on this in a bit.)