1

I want to split the string

String fields = "name[Employee Name], employeeno[Employee No], dob[Date of Birth], joindate[Date of Joining]";

to

name
employeeno
dob
joindate

I wrote the following java code for this but it is printing only name other matches are not printing.

String fields = "name[Employee Name], employeeno[Employee No], dob[Date of Birth], joindate[Date of Joining]";

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\[.+\\]+?,?\\s*" );

String[] split = pattern.split(fields);
for (String string : split) {
    System.out.println(string);
}

What am I doing wrong here?

Thank you

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
5

This part:

\\[.+\\]

matches the first [, the .+ then gobbles up the entire string (if no line breaks are in the string) and then the \\] will match the last ].

You need to make the .+ reluctant by placing a ? after it:

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\[.+?\\]+?,?\\s*");

And shouldn't \\]+? just be \\] ?

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4 Comments

I had made the ]+? portion as reluctant but didn't know that has to make the .+ also as reluctant. Thank you
Bart's right, there shouldn't be a quantifier after the closing ] at all, much less a reluctant one.
how should be regex for following string - Ms Abc<[email protected]>;Mr Cde<[email protected]>;Miss Xyz<[email protected]>";so i can split the title, name and email id, thanks
@Apache, if you have a question of your own, I recommend creating a new question.
4

The error is that you are matching greedily. You can change it to a non-greedy match:

Pattern.compile("\\[.+?\\],?\\s*")
                      ^
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1

There's an online regular expression tester at http://gskinner.com/RegExr/?2sa45 that will help you a lot when you try to understand regular expressions and how they are applied to a given input.

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0

WOuld it be better to use Negated Character Classes to match the square brackets? \[(\w+\s)+\w+[^\]]\]

You could also see a good example how does using a negated character class work internally (without backtracking)?

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