regex: find match only if inside start/stop section

I need tofind MATCH only if it is between START and STOP:

1. blah START hello MATCH bye STOP blah

2. blah START hello MATCH STOP blah

3. blah MATCH blah START hello MATCH STOP blah

e.g.: on line 3, only the 2nd MATCH should be found.

Please no开发者_开发知识库te that START, STOP and MATCH are not literals. They are expressed as parts regex of the regex.

Of course, a simplified but non elegant solution would consist in extracting the part between START and STOP and then looking for MATCH in there.

TIA,

@"START.*?(MATCH).*?STOP"

Just capture whatever "MATCH" is. You may have additional criteria for the things that can occur between START - MATCH - STOP (as opposed to just "."), if so, use a character class.

Try this:

/\bSTART\b.*?\bMATCH\b.*?\bSTOP\b/

Of if you're trying to capture it and are not speaking of these actual words:

/START.*?(MATCH).*?STOP/