extracting data with regex

Question

well i got a nice solution here but the regex split the string into "" string and 2 other splits i needed.

String  Result = "<ahref=https://blabla.com/Securities_regulation_in_the_United_States>Securities regulation in the United States</a> - Securities regulation in the United States is the field of U.S. law that covers transactions and other dealings with securities.";

String [] Arr =  Result.split("<[^>]*>");
for (String elem : Arr) {
    System.out.printf(elem);
}

the result is:

Arr[0]= ""
Arr[1]= Securities regulation in the United States
Arr[2]= Securities regulation in the United States is the field of U.S. law that covers transactions and other dealings with securities.

the Arr[1] and Arr[2] splits are fine I just cant get rid of the Arr[0].

Federico Piazza · Accepted Answer · 2015-08-14T17:39:52.140

2

You can use an opposite regex to capture what you want by using a regex like this:

(?s)(?:^|>)(.*?)(?:<|$)

Working demo

IDEOne Code working

Code:

String line = "ahref=https://blabla.com/Securities_regulation_in_the_United_States>Securities regulation in the United States</a> - Securities regulation in the United States is the field of U.S. law that covers transactions and other dealings with securities.";

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("(?s)(?:^|>)(.*?)(?:<|$)");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(line);
while (matcher.find()) {
    System.out.println("group 1: " + matcher.group(1));
}

edited Aug 14 '15 at 17:39

answered Aug 14 '15 at 17:16

Federico Piazza

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did it before it didnt work, i did it again. getting the same result – gb051 Aug 14 '15 at 17:18
@MattClark yes, you were right. Changed the script to match the strings instead of splitting it – Federico Piazza Aug 14 '15 at 17:32
for some reason still doesnt work : Arr[0]= " – gb051 Aug 14 '15 at 17:36
@gb051 what about this regex: `(?s)>(.*?)(?:<|$)` ? – Federico Piazza Aug 14 '15 at 17:37
Try parsing `foo
bar
baz`. With your current solution `foo` will be ignored. – Pshemo Aug 14 '15 at 17:37
@Pshemo thanks! Fortunately a constructive comment. Fixed now. – Federico Piazza Aug 14 '15 at 17:39
If line is `"xy"` you'd still get a blank value: `"x", "", "y"`. Prevent that by changing the capturing group part to `(.+?)`. – Andreas Aug 14 '15 at 18:02

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

1

You can't avoid that empty string if you are using only split, especially since your regex is not zero-length.

You could try removing that first match placed at start of your input, and then split in rest of matches like

String[] Arr =  Result.replaceFirst("^<[^>]+>","").split("<[^>]+>")

But generally you should avoid using regex with HTML\XML. Try using parser instead like Jsoup.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:21

Community

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answered Aug 14 '15 at 17:29

Pshemo

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how i can remove the "-" in the 2nd sentence? – gb051 Aug 14 '15 at 18:05
You could parse results and remove each `-` at start... You could also add this `-` to your delimiter on which you split, like `split("<[^>]+>(\\s*-\\s*)?")`. – Pshemo Aug 14 '15 at 18:07

extracting data with regex

2 Answers2