Java regular expressions to return specific values

You could always check the index of the tag substrings, and then extract the substring from there.


However, a regex can be used — you'd need to make use of both negative lookahead and lookbehind [I imagine].

Check out "Special constructs (non-capturing)" here:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html

Here's a regex which seems to work:

(?<=<tag1>).*(?=</tag1>)

>>(?<=<tag1>).*(?=</tag1>)

May we know where you got that one from?

What do you mean ?

(BTW, that's not to be used with String#split())

Correct me if I am wrong but the code
import java.util.regex.* ;

class Example
{
public static void main(String[]a)
{
    String input = "here's some text, bla bla bla <tag1>i want this</tag1> and <tag1>and this !!</tag1> more text bla bla bla";
   
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile( "(?<=<tag1>)[^><]*(?=</tag1>)" ) ;
    Matcher m = p.matcher( input ) ;
   
    int i = 0 ;
    while ( m.find() )
    {
        System.out.println( "Token["+(i++)+"]: "+m.group() ) ;
    }
}
}

Will give you everything including the tags.  Is there a way to get the string between the tags without the tags?

My bad.  you are right.  This works just fine.

I knew that I'd come to the right place :)

Thanks for the links CEHJ  and InteractiveMind.  I'd looked at those previously to posting, but they weren't making much sense in my little brain.  I reread CEHJ's post, and it made a little more sense the second time around.

I tried shivaspk's substring idea which works well if you only have one tag (per the warning).  But, I improved it a bit:

<<<code>>>
String text = "jsdf jskdfj ksd fj <tag1>some stuff here</tag1>";

// get the text between '<tag1>' and '</tag1>'
String result = text.substring(text.indexOf("<tag1>")+6, text.lastIndexOf("</tag1>"))
System.out.println(result.toString ()); // this prints "some stuff here"

<<< code>>>

And also (possibly) coded up one that will work for multiple tags (haven't tried it):

<<< code >>>
// these start from the beginning by default
String text = "jsdf jskdfj ksd fj <tag1>some stuff here</tag1> ksjdfksd sdkfj ksdf  <tag1>more here too</tag1> dksfj";
int startPointer = text.indexOf("<tag1>");
int endPointer = text.indexOf("</tag1>");

// find them all - indexOf will return -1 if nothing is found
while(startPointer > 0) {
   String result = text.substring(startPointer+5, endPointer);
   if(!result.equals("")
      System.out.println("found one: " + result.toString());

   // find the next tag in the stream
   startPointer = text.indexOf("<tag1>", endPointer+5);
   if(startPointer > 0)
      endPointer = text.indexOf("</tag1>", startPointer+5);

<<< code >>>

I actually like InteractiveMind's answer the best (it seems most geeky and I'm a geek so I liked it :)

Thanks a bunch Experts!

No probs :-)
Thanks for the points.

>>Will give you everything including the tags.  

Yes and no. It does, but since the lookbehind and lookahead are zero-width, that's of no consequence.

Thanks to IM - you've taught me something. I didn't know lookahead/behind were capable of variable length (which is why i commented earlier) ;-)

I learned a lot too :)