Develop Reference

How to parse string using regex

I'm pretty new to java, trying to find a way to do this better. Potentially using a regex.
String text = test.get(i).toString()
// text looks like this in string form:
// EnumOption[enumId=test,id=machine]
String checker = text.replace("[","").replace("]","").split(",")[1].split("=")[1];
// checker becomes machine
My goal is to parse that text string and just return back machine. Which is what I did in the code above.
But that looks ugly. I was wondering what kinda regex can be used here to make this a little better? Or maybe another suggestion?

Use a regex' lookbehind:
(?<=\bid=)[^],]*
See Regex101.
(?<= ) // Start matching only after what matches inside
\bid= // Match "\bid=" (= word boundary then "id="),
[^],]* // Match and keep the longest sequence without any ']' or ','
In Java, use it like this:
import java.util.regex.*;
class Main {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("(?<=\\bid=)[^],]*");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher("EnumOption[enumId=test,id=machine]");
if (matcher.find()) {
System.out.println(matcher.group(0));
}
}
}
This results in
machine

Assuming you’re using the Polarion ALM API, you should use the EnumOption’s getId method instead of deparsing and re-parsing the value via a string:
String id = test.get(i).getId();

Using the replace and split functions don't take the structure of the data into account.
If you want to use a regex, you can just use a capturing group without any lookarounds, where enum can be any value except a ] and comma, and id can be any value except ].
The value of id will be in capture group 1.
\bEnumOption\[enumId=[^=,\]]+,id=([^\]]+)\]
Explanation
\bEnumOption Match EnumOption preceded by a word boundary
\[enumId= Match [enumId=
[^=,\]]+, Match 1+ times any char except = , and ]
id= Match literally
( Capture group 1
[^\]]+ Match 1+ times any char except ]
)\]
Regex demo | Java demo
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\bEnumOption\\[enumId=[^=,\\]]+,id=([^\\]]+)\\]");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher("EnumOption[enumId=test,id=machine]");
if (matcher.find()) {
System.out.println(matcher.group(1));
}
Output
machine
If there can be more comma separated values, you could also only match id making use of negated character classes [^][]* before and after matching id to stay inside the square bracket boundaries.
\bEnumOption\[[^][]*\bid=([^,\]]+)[^][]*\]
In Java
String regex = "\\bEnumOption\\[[^][]*\\bid=([^,\\]]+)[^][]*\\]";
Regex demo

A regex can of course be used, but sometimes is less performant, less readable and more bug-prone.
I would advise you not use any regex that you did not come up with yourself, or at least understand completely.
PS: I think your solution is actually quite readable.
Here's another non-regex version:
String text = "EnumOption[enumId=test,id=machine]";
text = text.substring(text.lastIndexOf('=') + 1);
text = text.substring(0, text.length() - 1);
Not doing you a favor, but the downvote hurt, so here you go:
String input = "EnumOption[enumId=test,id=machine]";
Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("EnumOption\\[enumId=(.+),id=(.+)\\]").matcher(input);
if(!matcher.matches()) {
throw new RuntimeException("unexpected input: " + input);
}
System.out.println("enumId: " + matcher.group(1));
System.out.println("id: " + matcher.group(2));

What is the Regex for decimal numbers in Java?

I am not quite sure of what is the correct regex for the period in Java. Here are some of my attempts. Sadly, they all meant any character.
String regex = "[0-9]*[.]?[0-9]*";
String regex = "[0-9]*['.']?[0-9]*";
String regex = "[0-9]*["."]?[0-9]*";
String regex = "[0-9]*[\.]?[0-9]*";
String regex = "[0-9]*[\\.]?[0-9]*";
String regex = "[0-9]*.?[0-9]*";
String regex = "[0-9]*\.?[0-9]*";
String regex = "[0-9]*\\.?[0-9]*";
But what I want is the actual "." character itself. Anyone have an idea?
What I'm trying to do actually is to write out the regex for a non-negative real number (decimals allowed). So the possibilities are: 12.2, 3.7, 2., 0.3, .89, 19
String regex = "[0-9]*['.']?[0-9]*";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex);
String x = "5p4";
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(x);
System.out.println(matcher.find());
The last line is supposed to print false but prints true anyway. I think my regex is wrong though.

Update
To match non negative decimal number you need this regex:
^\d*\.\d+|\d+\.\d*$
or in java syntax : "^\\d*\\.\\d+|\\d+\\.\\d*$"
String regex = "^\\d*\\.\\d+|\\d+\\.\\d*$"
String string = "123.43253";
if(string.matches(regex))
System.out.println("true");
else
System.out.println("false");
Explanation for your original regex attempts:
[0-9]*\.?[0-9]*
with java escape it becomes :
"[0-9]*\\.?[0-9]*";
if you need to make the dot as mandatory you remove the ? mark:
[0-9]*\.[0-9]*
but this will accept just a dot without any number as well... So, if you want the validation to consider number as mandatory you use + ( which means one or more) instead of *(which means zero or more). That case it becomes:
[0-9]+\.[0-9]+

If you on Kotlin, use ktx:
fun String.findDecimalDigits() =
Pattern.compile("^[0-9]*\\.?[0-9]*").matcher(this).run { if (find()) group() else "" }!!

Your initial understanding was probably right, but you were being thrown because when using matcher.find(), your regex will find the first valid match within the string, and all of your examples would match a zero-length string.
I would suggest "^([0-9]+\\.?[0-9]*|\\.[0-9]+)$"

There are actually 2 ways to match a literal .. One is using backslash-escaping like you do there \\., and the other way is to enclose it inside a character class or the square brackets like [.]. Most of the special characters become literal characters inside the square brackets including .. So use \\. shows your intention clearer than [.] if all you want is to match a literal dot .. Use [] if you need to match multiple things which represents match this or that for example this regex [\\d.] means match a single digit or a literal dot

I have tested all the cases.
public static boolean isDecimal(String input) {
return Pattern.matches("^[-+]?\\d*[.]?\\d+|^[-+]?\\d+[.]?\\d*", input);
}

Escaping special characters in Java Regular Expressions

Is there any method in Java or any open source library for escaping (not quoting) a special character (meta-character), in order to use it as a regular expression?
This would be very handy in dynamically building a regular expression, without having to manually escape each individual character.
For example, consider a simple regex like \d+\.\d+ that matches numbers with a decimal point like 1.2, as well as the following code:
String digit = "d";
String point = ".";
String regex1 = "\\d+\\.\\d+";
String regex2 = Pattern.quote(digit + "+" + point + digit + "+");
Pattern numbers1 = Pattern.compile(regex1);
Pattern numbers2 = Pattern.compile(regex2);
System.out.println("Regex 1: " + regex1);
if (numbers1.matcher("1.2").matches()) {
System.out.println("\tMatch");
} else {
System.out.println("\tNo match");
}
System.out.println("Regex 2: " + regex2);
if (numbers2.matcher("1.2").matches()) {
System.out.println("\tMatch");
} else {
System.out.println("\tNo match");
}
Not surprisingly, the output produced by the above code is:
Regex 1: \d+\.\d+
Match
Regex 2: \Qd+.d+\E
No match
That is, regex1 matches 1.2 but regex2 (which is "dynamically" built) does not (instead, it matches the literal string d+.d+).
So, is there a method that would automatically escape each regex meta-character?
If there were, let's say, a static escape() method in java.util.regex.Pattern, the output of
Pattern.escape('.')
would be the string "\.", but
Pattern.escape(',')
should just produce ",", since it is not a meta-character. Similarly,
Pattern.escape('d')
could produce "\d", since 'd' is used to denote digits (although escaping may not make sense in this case, as 'd' could mean literal 'd', which wouldn't be misunderstood by the regex interpeter to be something else, as would be the case with '.').

Is there any method in Java or any open source library for escaping (not quoting) a special character (meta-character), in order to use it as a regular expression?
If you are looking for a way to create constants that you can use in your regex patterns, then just prepending them with "\\" should work but there is no nice Pattern.escape('.') function to help with this.
So if you are trying to match "\\d" (the string \d instead of a decimal character) then you would do:
// this will match on \d as opposed to a decimal character
String matchBackslashD = "\\\\d";
// as opposed to
String matchDecimalDigit = "\\d";
The 4 slashes in the Java string turn into 2 slashes in the regex pattern. 2 backslashes in a regex pattern matches the backslash itself. Prepending any special character with backslash turns it into a normal character instead of a special one.
matchPeriod = "\\.";
matchPlus = "\\+";
matchParens = "\\(\\)";
...
In your post you use the Pattern.quote(string) method. This method wraps your pattern between "\\Q" and "\\E" so you can match a string even if it happens to have a special regex character in it (+, ., \\d, etc.)

I wrote this pattern:
Pattern SPECIAL_REGEX_CHARS = Pattern.compile("[{}()\\[\\].+*?^$\\\\|]");
And use it in this method:
String escapeSpecialRegexChars(String str) {
return SPECIAL_REGEX_CHARS.matcher(str).replaceAll("\\\\$0");
}
Then you can use it like this, for example:
Pattern toSafePattern(String text)
{
return Pattern.compile(".*" + escapeSpecialRegexChars(text) + ".*");
}
We needed to do that because, after escaping, we add some regex expressions. If not, you can simply use \Q and \E:
Pattern toSafePattern(String text)
{
return Pattern.compile(".*\\Q" + text + "\\E.*")
}

The only way the regex matcher knows you are looking for a digit and not the letter d is to escape the letter (\d). To type the regex escape character in java, you need to escape it (so \ becomes \\). So, there's no way around typing double backslashes for special regex chars.

The Pattern.quote(String s) sort of does what you want. However it leaves a little left to be desired; it doesn't actually escape the individual characters, just wraps the string with \Q...\E.
There is not a method that does exactly what you are looking for, but the good news is that it is actually fairly simple to escape all of the special characters in a Java regular expression:
regex.replaceAll("[\\W]", "\\\\$0")
Why does this work? Well, the documentation for Pattern specifically says that its permissible to escape non-alphabetic characters that don't necessarily have to be escaped:
It is an error to use a backslash prior to any alphabetic character that does not denote an escaped construct; these are reserved for future extensions to the regular-expression language. A backslash may be used prior to a non-alphabetic character regardless of whether that character is part of an unescaped construct.
For example, ; is not a special character in a regular expression. However, if you escape it, Pattern will still interpret \; as ;. Here are a few more examples:
> becomes \> which is equivalent to >
[ becomes \[ which is the escaped form of [
8 is still 8.
\) becomes \\\) which is the escaped forms of \ and ( concatenated.
Note: The key is is the definition of "non-alphabetic", which in the documentation really means "non-word" characters, or characters outside the character set [a-zA-Z_0-9].

Use this Utility function escapeQuotes() in order to escape strings in between Groups and Sets of a RegualrExpression.
List of Regex Literals to escape <([{\^-=$!|]})?*+.>
public class RegexUtils {
static String escapeChars = "\\.?![]{}()<>*+-=^$|";
public static String escapeQuotes(String str) {
if(str != null && str.length() > 0) {
return str.replaceAll("[\\W]", "\\\\$0"); // \W designates non-word characters
}
return "";
}
}
From the Pattern class the backslash character ('\') serves to introduce escaped constructs. The string literal "\(hello\)" is illegal and leads to a compile-time error; in order to match the string (hello) the string literal "\\(hello\\)" must be used.
Example: String to be matched (hello) and the regex with a group is (\(hello\)). Form here you only need to escape matched string as shown below. Test Regex online
public static void main(String[] args) {
String matched = "(hello)", regexExpGrup = "(" + escapeQuotes(matched) + ")";
System.out.println("Regex : "+ regexExpGrup); // (\(hello\))
}

Agree with Gray, as you may need your pattern to have both litrals (\[, \]) and meta-characters ([, ]). so with some utility you should be able to escape all character first and then you can add meta-characters you want to add on same pattern.

use
pattern.compile("\"");
String s= p.toString()+"yourcontent"+p.toString();
will give result as yourcontent as is

How to remove special characters from a string?

I want to remove special characters like:
- + ^ . : ,
from an String using Java.

That depends on what you define as special characters, but try replaceAll(...):
String result = yourString.replaceAll("[-+.^:,]","");
Note that the ^ character must not be the first one in the list, since you'd then either have to escape it or it would mean "any but these characters".
Another note: the - character needs to be the first or last one on the list, otherwise you'd have to escape it or it would define a range ( e.g. :-, would mean "all characters in the range : to ,).
So, in order to keep consistency and not depend on character positioning, you might want to escape all those characters that have a special meaning in regular expressions (the following list is not complete, so be aware of other characters like (, {, $ etc.):
String result = yourString.replaceAll("[\\-\\+\\.\\^:,]","");
If you want to get rid of all punctuation and symbols, try this regex: \p{P}\p{S} (keep in mind that in Java strings you'd have to escape back slashes: "\\p{P}\\p{S}").
A third way could be something like this, if you can exactly define what should be left in your string:
String result = yourString.replaceAll("[^\\w\\s]","");
This means: replace everything that is not a word character (a-z in any case, 0-9 or _) or whitespace.
Edit: please note that there are a couple of other patterns that might prove helpful. However, I can't explain them all, so have a look at the reference section of regular-expressions.info.
Here's less restrictive alternative to the "define allowed characters" approach, as suggested by Ray:
String result = yourString.replaceAll("[^\\p{L}\\p{Z}]","");
The regex matches everything that is not a letter in any language and not a separator (whitespace, linebreak etc.). Note that you can't use [\P{L}\P{Z}] (upper case P means not having that property), since that would mean "everything that is not a letter or not whitespace", which almost matches everything, since letters are not whitespace and vice versa.
Additional information on Unicode
Some unicode characters seem to cause problems due to different possible ways to encode them (as a single code point or a combination of code points). Please refer to regular-expressions.info for more information.

This will replace all the characters except alphanumeric
replaceAll("[^A-Za-z0-9]","");

As described here
http://developer.android.com/reference/java/util/regex/Pattern.html
Patterns are compiled regular expressions. In many cases, convenience methods such as String.matches, String.replaceAll and String.split will be preferable, but if you need to do a lot of work with the same regular expression, it may be more efficient to compile it once and reuse it. The Pattern class and its companion, Matcher, also offer more functionality than the small amount exposed by String.
public class RegularExpressionTest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("String is = "+getOnlyStrings("!&(*^*(^(+one(&(^()(*)(*&^%$##!#$%^&*()("));
System.out.println("Number is = "+getOnlyDigits("&(*^*(^(+91-&*9hi-639-0097(&(^("));
}
public static String getOnlyDigits(String s) {
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("[^0-9]");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(s);
String number = matcher.replaceAll("");
return number;
}
public static String getOnlyStrings(String s) {
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("[^a-z A-Z]");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(s);
String number = matcher.replaceAll("");
return number;
}
}
Result
String is = one
Number is = 9196390097

Try replaceAll() method of the String class.
BTW here is the method, return type and parameters.
public String replaceAll(String regex,
String replacement)
Example:
String str = "Hello +-^ my + - friends ^ ^^-- ^^^ +!";
str = str.replaceAll("[-+^]*", "");
It should remove all the {'^', '+', '-'} chars that you wanted to remove!

To Remove Special character
String t2 = "!##$%^&*()-';,./?><+abdd";
t2 = t2.replaceAll("\\W+","");
Output will be : abdd.
This works perfectly.

Use the String.replaceAll() method in Java.
replaceAll should be good enough for your problem.

You can remove single char as follows:
String str="+919595354336";
String result = str.replaceAll("\\\\+","");
System.out.println(result);
OUTPUT:
919595354336

If you just want to do a literal replace in java, use Pattern.quote(string) to escape any string to a literal.
myString.replaceAll(Pattern.quote(matchingStr), replacementStr)

Regular expression matching "dictionary words"

I'm a Java user but I'm new to regular expressions.
I just want to have a tiny expression that, given a word (we assume that the string is only one word), answers with a boolean, telling if the word is valid or not.
An example... I want to catch all words that is plausible to be in a dictionary... So, i just want words with chars from a-z A-Z, an hyphen (for example: man-in-the-middle) and an apostrophe (like I'll or Tiffany's).
Valid words:
"food"
"RocKet"
"man-in-the-middle"
"kahsdkjhsakdhakjsd"
"JESUS", etc.
Non-valid words:
"gipsy76"
"www.google.com"
"me#gmail.com"
"745474"
"+-x/", etc.
I use this code, but it won't gave the correct answer:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[A-Za-z&-&']");
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
System.out.println(m.matches());
What's wrong with my regex?

Add a + after the expression to say "one or more of those characters":
Escape the hyphen with \ (or put it last).
Remove those & characters:
Here's the code:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[A-Za-z'-]+");
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
System.out.println(m.matches());
Complete test:
String[] ok = {"food","RocKet","man-in-the-middle","kahsdkjhsakdhakjsd","JESUS"};
String[] notOk = {"gipsy76", "www.google.com", "me#gmail.com", "745474","+-x/" };
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[A-Za-z'-]+");
for (String shouldMatch : ok)
if (!p.matcher(shouldMatch).matches())
System.out.println("Error on: " + shouldMatch);
for (String shouldNotMatch : notOk)
if (p.matcher(shouldNotMatch).matches())
System.out.println("Error on: " + shouldNotMatch);
(Produces no output.)

This should work:
"[A-Za-z'-]+"

But "-word" and "word-" are not valid. So you can uses this pattern:
WORD_EXP = "^[A-Za-z]+(-[A-Za-z]+)*$"

Regex - /^([a-zA-Z]*('|-)?[a-zA-Z]+)*/
You can use above regex if you don't want successive "'" or "-".
It will give you accurate matching your text.
It accepts
man-in-the-middle
asd'asdasd'asd
It rejects following string
man--in--midle
asdasd''asd

Hi Aloob please check with this, Bit lengthy, might be having shorter version of this, Still...
[A-z]*||[[A-z]*[-]*]*||[[A-z]*[-]*[']*]*