Regex Matches not working as excepted

I'm trying to group the following string into three groups.

0:0:Awesome:awesome

That being "0", "0" and "Awesome:awesome"

Using this regular expression:

^([0-9]+)\:([0-9]*)\:(.*)$

It works fine on online regex services: http://rubular.com/r/QePxt57EwU

But it seems like .NET doesn't agree. Picture of Regex problem from Visual Studio http://xs.to/image-开发者_如何学编程3F8A_4BA916BD.jpg

The MatchCollection contains the results of applying the regular expression to the source string iteratively. In your case there is only 1 match - so the results are correct. What you have are multiple captures within the match. This is what you want to compare against - not the number of matches.

MatchCollection matches = RegEx.Matches("0:0:Awesome:awesome",
                                        "^([0-9]+)\:([0-9]*)\:(.*)$");

if( matches.Count != 1 && matches[0].Captures.Count != 3 )
  //...

When you want to access the matched groups the following could help you

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace Test
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var pattern = "^([0-9]+)\\:([0-9]*)\\:(.*)$";

            var matches = Regex.Match("0:0:Awesome:awesome", pattern);

            foreach (var match in matches.Groups)
                Console.WriteLine(match);
        }
    }
}

I think this regexp would suit

(?<nums>\d+\:?)+(?<rest>.*)

Then you can get the groupings for 'num' and 'rest' together as shown

public Regex MyRegex = new Regex(
      "^(?<nums>\\d+\\:?)+(?<rest>.*)$",
    RegexOptions.IgnoreCase
    | RegexOptions.CultureInvariant
    | RegexOptions.IgnorePatternWhitespace
    | RegexOptions.Compiled
    );
MatchCollection ms = MyRegex.Matches(InputText);

Where InputText would contain the sample '0:0:Awesome:Awesome'