Match at every second occurrence

Is there a way to specify a regular expression to match every 2nd occurrence of a pattern in a string?

Examples

searching for a against string abcdabcd should find one occurrence at position 5
searching for ab against string abcdabcd should find one occurrence at position 5
searching for dab against string abcdabcd should find no occurrences
searching for a against string aaaa should find two occurrences at positions 2 and 4

Use grouping.

foo.*?(foo)

Suppose the pattern you want is abc+d. You want to match the second occurrence of this pattern in a string.

You would construct the following regex:

abc+d.*?(abc+d)

This would match strings of the form: <your-pattern>...<your-pattern>. Since we're using the reluctant qualifier *? we're safe that there cannot be another match of between the two. Using matcher groups which pretty much all regex implementations provide you would then retrieve the string in the bracketed group which is what you want.

If you're using C#, you can either get all the matches at once (i.e. use Regex.Matches(), which returns a MatchCollection, and check the index of the item: index % 2 != 0).

If you want to find the occurrence to replace it, use one of the overloads of Regex.Replace() that uses a MatchEvaluator (e.g. Regex.Replace(String, String, MatchEvaluator). Here's the code:

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

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string input = "abcdabcd";

            // Replace *second* a with m

            string replacedString = Regex.Replace(
                input,
                "a",
                new SecondOccuranceFinder("m").MatchEvaluator);

            Console.WriteLine(replacedString);
            Console.Read();

        }

        class SecondOccuranceFinder
        {
            public SecondOccuranceFinder(string replaceWith)
            {
                _replaceWith = replaceWith;
                _matchEvaluator = new MatchEvaluator(IsSecondOccurance);
            }

            private string _replaceWith;

            private MatchEvaluator _matchEvaluator;
            public MatchEvaluator MatchEvaluator
            {
                get
                {
                    return _matchEvaluator;
                }
            }

            private int _matchIndex;
            public string IsSecondOccurance(Match m)
            {
                _matchIndex++;
                if (_matchIndex % 2 == 0)
                    return _replaceWith;
                else
                    return m.Value;
            }
        }
    }
}

Match at every second occurrence

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