Capture Class
[ This article is for Windows Phone 8 developers. If you’re developing for Windows 10, see the latest documentation. ]
Represents the results from a single subexpression capture.
Assembly: System (in System.dll)
The Capture type exposes the following members.
| Name | Description | |
|---|---|---|
 | Equals(Object) | Determines whether the specified Object is equal to the current Object. (Inherited from Object.) |
 | Finalize | Allows an object to try to free resources and perform other cleanup operations before the Object is reclaimed by garbage collection. (Inherited from Object.) |
| GetHashCode | Serves as a hash function for a particular type. (Inherited from Object.) |
| GetType | Gets the Type of the current instance. (Inherited from Object.) |
| MemberwiseClone | Creates a shallow copy of the current Object. (Inherited from Object.) |
| ToString | Gets the captured substring from the input string. (Overrides Object::ToString().) |
A Capture object is immutable and has no public constructor. Instances are returned through the CaptureCollection object, which is returned by the Match.Captures and Group::Captures properties. However, the Match.Captures property provides information about the same match as the Match object.
If you do not apply a quantifier to a capturing group, the Group::Captures property returns a CaptureCollection with a single Capture object that provides information about the same capture as the Group object. If you do apply a quantifier to a capturing group, the Group.Index, Group.Length, and Group.Value properties provide information only about the last captured group, whereas the Capture objects in the CaptureCollection provide information about all subexpression captures. The example provides an illustration.
The following example defines a regular expression that matches sentences that contain no punctuation except for a period (".").
The regular expression pattern ((\w+)[\s.])+ is defined as shown in the following table. Note that in this regular expression, a quantifier is applied to the entire regular expression.
Pattern | Description |
|---|---|
(\w+) | Match one or more word characters. This is the second capturing group. |
[\s.]) | Match a white-space character or period ("."). |
((\w+)[\s.]) | Match one or more word characters followed by a white-space character or period ("."). This is the first capturing group. |
((\w+)[\s.])+ | Match one or more occurrences of a word character or characters followed by a white-space character or period ("."). |
In this example, the input string consists of two sentences. As the output shows, because the first sentence consists of only one word, the CaptureCollection object has a single Capture object that represents the same capture as the Group object. Because the second sentence consists of multiple words, the Group objects only contain information about the last matched subexpression. Group 1, which represents the first capture, contains the last word in the sentence with a closing period. Group 2, which represents the second capture, contains the last word in the sentence. However, the Capture objects in the group's CaptureCollection object capture each subexpression match. The Capture objects in the first capturing group's collection of captures contain information about each captured word and white-space character or period. The Capture objects in the second capturing group's collection of captures contain information about each captured word.