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Group::Captures Property

Gets a collection of all the captures matched by the capturing group, in innermost-leftmost-first order (or innermost-rightmost-first order if the regular expression is modified with the RegexOptions::RightToLeft option). The collection may have zero or more items.

Namespace:  System.Text.RegularExpressions
Assembly:  System (in System.dll)
property CaptureCollection^ Captures {
	CaptureCollection^ get ();

Property Value

Type: System.Text.RegularExpressions::CaptureCollection
The collection of substrings matched by the group.

If a quantifier is not applied to a capturing group, the collection returned by the Captures property contains a single Capture object that provides information about the same substring as the Group object. This is illustrated in the following example. It defines a regular expression, \b(\w+)\b, that extracts a single word from a sentence. The Group object captures the word "This", and the single object in the CaptureCollection contains information about the same capture.


The real utility of the Captures property occurs when a quantifier is applied to a capturing group so that the group captures multiple substrings in a single regular expression. In this case, the Group object contains information about the last captured substring, whereas the Captures property contains information about all the substrings captured by the group. In the following example, the regular expression \b(\w+\s*)+\. matches an entire sentence that ends in a period. The group (\w+\s*)+ captures the individual words in the collection. Because the Group collection contains information only about the last captured substring, it captures the last word in the sentence, "sentence". However, each word captured by the group is available from the collection returned by the Captures property.


.NET Framework


.NET Framework Client Profile

Supported in: 4, 3.5 SP1

Portable Class Library

Supported in: Portable Class Library


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