I've used .Contains() to find if a sentence contains a specific word however I found something weird:
I wanted to find if the word "hi" was present in a sentence which are as follows:
The child wanted to play in the mud
Hi there
Hector had a hip problem
if(sentence.contains("hi"))
{
//
}
I only want the SECOND sentence to be filtered however all 3 gets filtered since CHILD has a 'hi' in it and hip has a 'hi' in it. How do I use the .Contains() such that only whole words get picked out?
Try using Regex:
if (Regex.Match(sentence, @"\bhi\b", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Success)
{
//
};
This works just fine for me on your input text.
Here is a Regex solution:
Regex has a word boundary anchor using \b
Also, if the search string can come from user input, you might consider escaping the string using Regex.Escape
This example should filter a list of strings the way you want.
string findme = "hi"; string pattern = @"\b" + Regex.Escape(findme) + @"\b"; Regex re = new Regex(pattern,RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); List<string> data = new List<string> { "The child wanted to play in the mud", "Hi there", "Hector had a hip problem" }; var filtered = data.Where(d => re.IsMatch(d));You could split your sentence into words - you could split at each space and then trim any punctuation. Then check if any of these words are 'hi':
var punctuation = source.Where(Char.IsPunctuation).Distinct().ToArray();
var words = sentence.Split().Select(x => x.Trim(punctuation));
var containsHi = words.Contains("hi", StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
See a working demo here: https://dotnetfiddle.net/AomXWx