CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaregex
chomsky
chomsky

Reputation: 300

RegExp for catching text between parenthesis and/or quotes

I have the strings:

background: url('../../footer/right.png') repeat;

background: url("../../footer/left.png") repeat;

And i want to extract just the URL like this:

../../footer/right.png

../../footer/left.png

My RegExps so far are

.*?[(\'|(\"|(|\'|\"](.*?)[\"|\'|)|\")|\')].*?

[[\\(\']([^\']*?)[\'\\)]]|[\\(\"]([^\"]*?)[\"\\)]|[\\(]([^)]*?)[\\)]|[\']([^\']*?)[\']|[\"]([^\"]*?)[\"]

But it keeps given me

background: url../../footer/izquierdo.png repeat;

Why it does this and what´s the correct Pattern?

Edit

I have come to the answer with your help, but i don´t quite know why it works

(?<=\\(|\'|\")(.*?)(?=\'|\"|\\))

Any one know why it can match any combinations of ( (" (' ' " ?

And BTW, this matchs are correct for my logic (I don't mention it early but they do)

Thanks everyone for the help

Upvotes: 1

Views: 70

Answers (5)

ajb
ajb

Reputation: 31689

Looking at this part of your regex:

[('|("|(|'|"]

(I've eliminated the backslashes that you need inside a Java string literal.) When you have a set of characters enclosed by [] in a regex, the effect is to match one character that must be in the set. Thus, [abc] matches one character that can either be 'a', 'b', or 'c'. It never matches a sequence of more than one character. There are other features, for example using ^ as the first character means match a character not in the set, and there are ways to specify entire character classes such as \d for digit.

However, it appears that you're trying to use it to match a multiple-character sequence, i.e. you're looking for (' or (" in the string. You can't use a [] construct for that. The way you've written it, it will match one character that is either (, ', |, or ".

Upvotes: 0

Luca Sepe
Luca Sepe

Reputation: 2445

Try this:

url\([\'|\"](.+)[\'|\"]\)

as Java string will be:

"url\\([\\'|\\\"](.+)[\\'|\\\"]\\)"

Upvotes: 0

Robin
Robin

Reputation: 9644

You can use (adding escape for the quote where you need them)

(?|'([^']*)'|"([^"]*)")

Your answer will be in the first captured group (thanks to (?|...|...), used to reset the capturing groups index)

Upvotes: 0

Pshemo
Pshemo

Reputation: 124225

How about using something like 

\\(('|\")(.*?)\\1\\)

or maybe even add url before

url\\(('|\")(.*?)\\1\\)

\\1 represents match from group 1, which can be only ' or ". Point in using it here is to make sure that we have same kind of quote after and before parenthesis.

This regex will place ../../footer/right.png part in group 2, so you can just get it using matcher.group(2).

Example:

String data = "background: url('../../footer/right.png') repeat;\r\n" + 
        "\r\n" + 
        "background: url(\"../../footer/left.png\") repeat;";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\(('|\")(.*?)\\1\\)");
Matcher m = p.matcher(data);
while (m.find())
    System.out.println(m.group(2));

Output:

../../footer/right.png
../../footer/left.png

Upvotes: 1

Rakesh KR
Rakesh KR

Reputation: 6527

Try with String.split()

String urlStr = "background: url('../../footer/right.png') repeat;";
String url = urlStr.split("'")[1];
System.out.println(url);

output

../../footer/right.png

Upvotes: 0

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