Parsing question

That's what I would use.  I would also use word boundaries to make sure it doesn't match in the middle of a word - ex: TRACE

myRegExp.Pattern = "\s*\b(MOTHER|RACE|GENDER|AGE|\(DOB\)|SSN|PHONE)\b\s*"

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OK,  thanks.  I know regular expressions stuff is powerful, but I have not used them much.   In your example of TRACE, I would not want that to match because, even thought it contains RACE.   There would only ever be spaces between MOTHER and RACE, so I would want "MOTHER     TRACE" to not match.

>>  In your example of TRACE, I would not want that to match because, even thought it contains RACE
That's exactly why I included the "\b" (word boundary) delimiters.  The expression above would match RACE, but not if it is part of a larger word.

Are you looking for the entire substring "MOTHER             RACE       GENDER    AGE (DOB)      SSN      PHONE" in that specific order in a larger string (with varying spaces between the words of course), OR are you looking for any of those words?  The regex I posted looks for each of those words -- the "|" means "OR".  In other words it states, match "MOTHER OR RACE OR ..."

Also, I need the index/offset of that substring within a larger string

Ah, sorry.  I'm looking for a string with ALL those words, with varying spaces between the words.

OK, then change the "|" to "\s+"

myRegExp.Pattern = "\s*\b(MOTHER\s+RACE\s+GENDER\s+AGE\s+\(DOB\)\s+SSN\s+PHONE)\b\s*"

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ah, great!  that works.  So in english, what does this search string do?  

search for a string that begins and ends with spaces, and

Inside the parens is the string to search for, and

\s+ means there can be any number of spaces .

What does the \b mean?

Thanks so much!