Java RegEx to extract nth group

Question

I need to extract only the first match of the following:

Input (please ignore any possibility to treat it as XML, using XPath, etc. - it's just an example):

<city>NYC - New York </city><city>PAR - Paris</city><city>NYC - New York </city><city>MIA - Miami</city>

RegEx:

(?si).*?(?:NYC\s-\s)([^<]*)

As you can see, I already made it lazy, however both New York are being captured. If I leave it greedy, only the last one is being captured. I need to limit, via regular expression (not via find method), to capture only the first one (in fact, the best would be to control which one I want, like the 8th occurrence). I'm afraid it will make the regular expression very messy. Any help? Thanks!

Amal · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-30 18:36:48Z

1

You can use the following regex:

(?si)(?:(?:NYC\s-\s)([^<]*).*?){n}

Where n is the ordinal number of the occurrence you would like to capture.

Live demo

answered Aug 30, 2014 at 18:36

Amal

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1 Comment

igorjrr Over a year ago

Thanks, but this RegEx is causing find() to be valid twice when n=1. For n=2, it's fine (only one find).

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