Qu,

In my idea is mostly using the split the first way I try, probably is your
problem however a real Regex problem.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.text.regularexpressions.regex.aspx

Cor

Hi,

No, there is no easy way of doing that. You need to parse the string
(not an easy task per se) and generate a Regex struct to later use to
compare

Maybe linq could be a solution. I'm still on .Net 2.0 so I'm not familiar
with its limitations. (or the select method in a dataset has some
abilities).

If this is to gather data in a database, then maybe your database supports
this sort of expression.

Otherwise your asking quite a lot as the system that parses these
expressions has to understand boolean logic across numbers and strings plus
partial string matching. And it has to cope with user error!

Generally this means you need to implement a parser, and this is quite
involved

I found the following a good tool to develop one in .Net...
http://www.devincook.com/goldparser/
Far better than going through, character by character!

It sounds like you interface is not GUI based. If it was then one way would
be to make the GUI provide an editor that controls the filter logic a user
can enter. In this way you can enforce the syntax making writing the filter
code easier. In my GUIs i tend to let the user do from/to for number fields
and partial string matching for text fields. I combine them together (AND)
and this covers most peoples needs without getting complex.