I'm not really good at regex (I only get to use it a few times a year) and want to see if someone can help with a C# regex statement which finds all instances of
<####-##-##> or </####-##-##>
and replaces it with
<date-####-##-##> or </date-####-##-##>
so that
<2012-01-01>stuff</2012-01-01><2012-05-01>stuff2</2012-05-01>
becomes
<date-2012-01-01>stuff</date-2012-01-01><date-2012-05-01>stuff2</date-2012-05-01>
string test = "<2012-01-01>stuff</2012-01-01><2012-05-01>stuff2</2012-05-01>";
var regex = new Regex(@"<(/?)(\d\d\d\d)-(\d\d)-(\d\d)>");
var result = regex.Replace(test, @"<$1date-$2-$3-$4>");
Console.WriteLine(result);
//output:
//<date-2012-01-01>stuff</date-2012-01-01><date-2012-05-01>stuff2</date-2012-05-01>
Note that the need for detail goes up depending on the other text in the strings your are processing. Are there lots of other tags? Numbers that aren't dates? etc..
If you examine the values inside tags this would be a solution.
if(Regex.IsMatch(input, @"^(19|20)\d\d[- /.](0[1-9]|1[012])[- /.](0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])$"))
{
input.Replace(input,"date-"+input);
}
