[c#] Regular Expression to get all characters before "-"

How can I get the string before the character "-" using regular expressions?

For example, I have "text-1" and I want to return "text".

Find all word and space characters up to and including a -

^[\w ]+-

If you want use RegEx in .NET,

Regex rx = new Regex(@"^([\w]+)(\-)*");
var match = rx.Match("thisis-thefirst");
var text = match.Groups[1].Value;
Assert.AreEqual("thisis", text);

You could just use another non-regex based method. Someone gave the suggestion of using Substring, but you could also use Split:

string testString = "my-string";
string[] splitString = testString.Split("-");
string resultingString = splitString[0]; //my

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/ms228388%28v=VS.80%29.aspx for another good example.

This is something like the regular expression you need:

([^-]*)-

Quick tests in JavaScript:

/([^-]*)-/.exec('text-1')[1] // 'text'

/([^-]*)-/.exec('foo-bar-1')[1] // 'foo'

/([^-]*)-/.exec('-1')[1] // ''

/([^-]*)-/.exec('quux')[1] // explodes

Here is my suggestion - it's quite simple as that:

[^-]*

I dont think you need regex to achieve this. I would look at the SubString method along with the indexOf method. If you need more help, add a comment showing what you have attempted and I will offer more help.