Sub string from a word to another word

Question

I want to find word "cat" from the sentence: My cat is missing.
Please provide a generic solution which works for ant set of statements for finding a word.

Answer 1

Since "cat" can be found inside of other words it is better to use Regex to extract hole words like in the code below
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
namespace ConsoleApplication21
class Program
static void Main(string[] args)
string input = "My cat is missing";
string pattern = @"^(\w+\s?)+$";
Regex expr = new Regex(pattern);
Match match = expr.Match(input);
Group group = match.Groups[1];
foreach (Capture capture in group.Captures)
Console.WriteLine("Word : {0}", capture.ToString());
jdweng
I'd like to suggest a couple of changes to build on Joel Engineer's answer.
Firstly, that's a rather restrictive pattern.  The period at the end of the sentence will confound it (which I notice was removed from the example), and so would a word like "isn't".  I'd use \b to make this pattern:
\bcat\b
\b matches a word boundary, and is specifically designed for performing whole-word matching like this.
Also, a case-insensitive matching option would be good here.
Then you can get the index of the match using Regex.Matches, which seems more useful than just knowing whether "cat" is in there somewhere or not, and seems more in the spirit of actually
finding the match.
static void Main( string[] args )
string input = @"My cat is missing.";
string pattern = @"\bcat\b";
MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches( input, pattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase );
if( matches.Count > 0 ) {
// found
Console.WriteLine( "Found at index {0}", matches[0].Index );
} else {
Console.WriteLine( "Not found" );