Extracting information from a text using Regex and Match in C# .NET

Occasionally you need to extract some information from a free-text form. Consider the following text:

First name: Elvis
Last name: Presley
Address: 1 Heaven Street
City: Memphis
State: TN
Zip: 12345

Say you need to extract the full name, the address, the city, the state and the zip code into a pipe-delimited string. The following function is one option:

private static string ExtractJist(string freeText)
{
	StringBuilder patternBuilder = new StringBuilder();
	patternBuilder.Append(@"First name: (?<fn>.*$)\n")
		.Append("Last name: (?<ln>.*$)\n")
		.Append("Address: (?<address>.*$)\n")
		.Append("City: (?<city>.*$)\n")
		.Append("State: (?<state>.*$)\n")
		.Append("Zip: (?<zip>.*$)");
	Match match = Regex.Match(freeText, patternBuilder.ToString(), RegexOptions.Multiline | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
	string fullname = string.Concat(match.Groups["fn"], " ", match.Groups["ln"]);
	string address = match.Groups["address"].ToString();
	string city = match.Groups["city"].ToString();
	string state = match.Groups["state"].ToString();
	string zip = match.Groups["zip"].ToString();
	return string.Concat(fullname, "|", address, "|", city, "|", state, "|", zip);
}

Call the function as follows:

string source = @"First name: Elvis
Last name: Presley
Address: 1 Heaven Street
City: Memphis
State: TN
Zip: 12345
";
string extracted = ExtractJist(source);

View all posts related to string and text operations here.

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About Andras Nemes
I'm a .NET/Java developer living and working in Stockholm, Sweden.

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