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));

Matching Urls Inside Strings

I am trying to write a regex that will match urls inside strings of text that may be html-encoded. I am having a considerable amount of trouble with lookaround though. I need something that would correctly match both links in the string below:
some text "http://www.notarealwebsite.com/?q=asdf&searchOrder=1" "http://www.notarealwebsite.com" some other text
A verbose description of what I want would be: "http://" followed by any number of characters that are not spaces, quotes, or the string "&quot[semicolon]" (I don't care about accepting other non-url-safe characters as delimiters)
I have tried a few regexes using lookahead to check for &'s followed by q's followed by u's and so on, but as soon as I put one into the [^...] negation it just completely breaks down and evaluates more like: "http:// followed by any number of characters that are not spaces, quotes, ampersands, q's, u's, o's, t's, or semicolons" which is obviously not what I am looking for.
This will correctly match the &'s at the beginning of the &quot[semicolon]:
&(?=q(?=u(?=o(?=t(?=;)))))
But this does not work:
http://[^ "&(?=q(?=u(?=o(?=t(?=;)))))]*
I know just enough about regexes to get into trouble, and that includes not knowing why this won't work the way I want it to. I understand to some extent positive and negative lookaround, but I don't understand why it breaks down inside the [^...]. Is it possible to do this with regexes? Or am I wasting my time trying to make it work?

If your regex implementation supports it, use a positive look ahead and a backreference with a non-greedy expression in the body.
Here is one with your conditions: (["\s]|")(http://.*?)(?=\1)
For example, in Python:
import re
p = re.compile(r'(["\s]|")(https?://.*?)(?=\1)', re.IGNORECASE)
url = "http://test.url/here.php?var1=val&var2=val2"
formatstr = 'text "{0}" more text {0} and more "{0}" test greed"'
data = formatstr.format(url)
for m in p.finditer(data):
print "Found:", m.group(2)
Produces:
Found: http://test.url/here.php?var1=val&var2=val2
Found: http://test.url/here.php?var1=val&var2=val2
Found: http://test.url/here.php?var1=val&var2=val2
Or in Java:
#Test
public void testRegex() {
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("([\"\\s]|")(https?://.*?)(?=\\1)",
Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
final String URL = "http://test.url/here.php?var1=val&var2=val2";
final String INPUT = "some text " + URL + " more text + \"" + URL +
"\" more then "" + URL + "" testing greed "";
Matcher m = p.matcher(INPUT);
while( m.find() ) {
System.out.println("Found: " + m.group(2));
}
}
Produces the same output.

Replace whole tokens that may contain regular expression

I want to do a startStr.replaceAll(searchStr, replaceStr) and I have two requirements.
The searchStr must be a whole word, meaning it must have a space, beginning of string or end of string character around it.
e.g.
startStr = "ON cONfirmation, put ON your hat"
searchStr = "ON"
replaceStr = ""
expected = " cONfirmation, put your hat"
The searchStr may contain a regex pattern
e.g.
startStr = "remove this * thing"
searchStr = "*"
replaceStr = ""
expected = "remove this thing"
For requirement 1, I've found that this works:
startStr.replaceAll("\\b"+searchStr+"\\b",replaceStr)
For requirement 2, I've found that this works:
startStr.replaceAll(Pattern.quote(searchStr), replaceStr)
But I can't get them to work together:
startStr.replaceAll("\\b"+Pattern.quote(searchStr)+"\\b", replaceStr)
Here is the simple test case that's failing
startStr = "remove this * thing but not this*"
searchStr = "*"
replaceStr = ""
expected = "remove this thing but not this*"
actual = "remove this * thing but not this*"
What am I missing?
Thanks in advance

First off, the \b, or word boundary, is not going to work for you with the asterisks. The reason is that \b only detects boundaries of word characters. A regex parser won't acknowledge * as a word character, so a wildcard-endowed word that begins or ends with a regex won't be surrounded by valid word boundaries.
Reference pages:
http://www.regular-expressions.info/wordboundaries.html
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/regex/bounds.html
An option you might like is to supply wildcard permutations in a regex:
(?<=\s|^)(ON|\*N|O\*|\*)(?=\s|$)
Here's a Java example:
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
class RegExTest
{
public static void main(String[] args){
String sourcestring = "ON cONfirmation, put * your hat";
sourcestring = sourcestring.replaceAll("(?<=\\s|^)(ON|\\*N|O\\*|\\*)(?=\\s|$)","").replaceAll(" "," ").trim();
System.out.println("sourcestring=["+sourcestring+"]");
}
}
You can write a little function to generate the wildcard permutations automatically. I admit I cheated a little with the spaces, but I don't think that was a requirement anyway.
Play with it online here: http://ideone.com/7uGfIS

The pattern "\\b" matches a word boundary, with a word character on one side and a non-word character on the other. * is not a word character, so \\b\\*\\b won't work. Look-behind and look-ahead match but do not consume patterns. You can specify that the beginning of the string or whitespace must come before your pattern and that whitespace or the end of the string must follow:
startStr.replaceAll("(?<=^|\\s)"+Pattern.quote(searchStr)+"(?=\\s|$)", replaceStr)

Try this,
For removing "ON"
StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
String[] splittedValue = startStr.split(" ");
for (String value : splittedValue)
{
if (!value.equalsIgnoreCase("ON"))
{
stringBuilder.append(value);
stringBuilder.append(" ");
}
}
System.out.println(stringBuilder.toString().trim());
For removing "*"
String startStr1 = "remove this * thing";
System.out.println(startStr1.replaceAll("\\*[\\s]", ""));

You can use (^| )\*( |$) instead of using \\b
Try this startStr.replaceAll("(^| )youSearchString( |$)", replaceStr);

Need help in Regex to exclude splitting string within "

I need to split a String based on comma as seperator, but if the part of string is enclosed with " the splitting has to stop for that portion from starting of " to ending of it even it contains commas in between.
Can anyone please help me to solve this using regex with look around.

Resurrecting this question because it had a simple regex solution that wasn't mentioned. This situation sounds very similar to ["regex-match a pattern unless..."][4]
\"[^\"]*\"|(,)
The left side of the alternation matches complete double-quoted strings. We will ignore these matches. The right side matches and captures commas to Group 1, and we know they are the right ones because they were not matched by the expression on the left.
Here is working code (see online demo):
import java.util.regex.*;
import java.util.List;
class Program {
public static void main (String[] args) {
String subject = "\"Messages,Hello\",World,Hobbies,Java\",Programming\"";
Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("\"[^\"]*\"|(,)");
Matcher m = regex.matcher(subject);
StringBuffer b = new StringBuffer();
while (m.find()) {
if(m.group(1) != null) m.appendReplacement(b, "SplitHere");
else m.appendReplacement(b, m.group(0));
}
m.appendTail(b);
String replaced = b.toString();
String[] splits = replaced.split("SplitHere");
for (String split : splits)
System.out.println(split);
} // end main
} // end Program
Reference
How to match pattern except in situations s1, s2, s3

Please try this:
(?<!\G\s*"[^"]*),
If you put this regex in your program, it should be:
String regex = "(?<!\\G\\s*\"[^\"]*),";
But 2 things are not clear:
Does the " only start near the ,, or it can start in the middle of content, such as AAA, BB"CC,DD" ? The regex above only deal with start neer , .
If the content has " itself, how to escape? use "" or \"? The regex above does not deal any escaped " format.

String Matches, Java

I have a sort of a problem with this code:
String[] paragraph;
if(paragraph[searchKeyword_counter].matches("(.*)(\\b)"+"is"+"(\\b)(.*)")){
if i am not mistaken to use .matches() and search a particular character in a string i need a .* but what i want to happen is to search a character without matching it to another word.
For example is the keyword i am going to search I do not want it to match with words that contain is character like ship, his, this. so i used \b for boundary but the code above is not working for me.
Example:
String[] Content= {"is,","his","fish","ish","its","is"};
String keyword = "is";
for(int i=0;i<Content.length;i++){
if(content[i].matches("(.*)(\\b)"+keyword+"(\\b)(.*)")){
System.out.println("There are "+i+" is.");
}
}
What i want to happen here is that it will only match with is is, but not with his fish. So is should match with is, and is meaning I want it to match even the character is beside a non-alphanumerical character and spaces.
What is the problem with the code above?
what if one of the content has a uppercase character example IS and it is compared with is, it will be unmatched. Correct my if i am wrong. How to match a lower cased character to a upper cased character without changing the content of the source?

String string = "...";
String word = "is";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\b" + Pattern.quote(word) + "\\b");
Matcher m = p.matcher(string);
if (m.find()) {
...
}

just add spaces like this:
suppose message equal your content string and pattern is your keyword
if ((message).matches(".* " + pattern + " .*")||(message).matches("^" + pattern + " .*")
||(message).matches(".* " + pattern + "$")) {