regex to find a word before and after a specific word

Question

I need a regex that gives me the word before and after a specific word, included the search word itself.

Like: \"This is some dummy text to find a word\" sh

Answer 1

EDIT:

If you want to grab all the content from the space before first word to the space after the word use:

(?:\S+\s)?\S*text\S*(?:\s\S+)?

A simple tests:

string input = @"
    This is some dummy text to find a word in a string full with text and words
    Text is too read
    Read my text.
    This is a text-field example
    this is some dummy la@text.be to read";

var matches = Regex.Matches(
    input,
    @"(?:\S+\s)?\S*text\S*(?:\s\S+)?",
    RegexOptions.IgnoreCase
);

the matches are:

dummy text to
with text and
Text is
my text.
a text-field example
dummy la@text.be to

Answer 2

/[A-Za-z'-]+ text [A-Za-z'-]+/

Should work in most cases, including hyphenated and compound words.

Answer 3

([A-z]+) text ([A-z]+)

would do nicely

Answer 4

//I prefer this style for readability

string pattern = @"(?<before>\w+) text (?<after>\w+)";
string input = "larry text bob fred text ginger fred text barney";
MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(input, pattern);

for (int i = 0; i < matches.Count; i++)
{
    Console.WriteLine("before:" + matches[i].Groups["before"].ToString());
    Console.WriteLine("after:" + matches[i].Groups["after"].ToString());
} 

/* Output:
before:larry
after:bob
before:fred
after:ginger
before:fred
after:barney
*/

Answer 5

[a-zA-Z]+\stext\s[a-zA-Z]+

I believe this will work nicely