Breaking down components in a String sentence by user

Question

For example: Someone orders some movie passes: User enters : 3 tickets for Taken 2 at 17.50 How can I extract the quantity of tickets purchased, know the movie selected and total the costs from the entered string.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

                 String Mac1
         System.out.println("Enter num of tickets, movie & (at) ticket price:");
         Mac1 = input.nextLine();

         String Mov1[]= Mac1.split(", ");

           for (int i = 0; i < Mov1.length; i++) 
           {
               System.out.print(Mov1[i]);

           }

Are inputs always of the form "N tickets for This_Movie at This_Time"? — Chris, Nov 10 '12 at 22:46

Reimeus · Answer 1 · 2012-11-10T23:04:28.050

2

Using regex appears a better fit here:

Matcher m = Pattern.compile("(\\d+) tickets for (.*) at (.*)").matcher(Mac1);
if (m.matches()) {
  int tickets = Integer.parseInt(m.group(1));
  String movie = m.group(2);
  double cost = Double.parseDouble(m.group(3));
  double total = tickets * cost;
}

edited Nov 10 '12 at 23:04

answered Nov 10 '12 at 22:48

Reimeus

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 10 '12 at 22:47

1

Seems like regular expressions are the best tool for the job (no matter how bad it looks):

(\\d+) tickets for (.*) at (\\d{1,2})[.:](\\d{2})

answered Nov 10 '12 at 22:47

Tomasz Nurkiewicz

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@ Chris, Number of tickets, for This_Movie at This price, I might need to add time into the string. – Nov 10 '12 at 22:56

Breaking down components in a String sentence by user

2 Answers2