CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaregex
One Two Three
One Two Three

Reputation: 23497

regex to match and retrieve some tokens

The strings I am interested in look like something like the followings a1.foo, a2.bar, a3.whatever

Now I need to retrieve the number. So I wrote this piece of code (in Java), thinking it would work, but it does not. Could anyone please let me know what is wrong with my pattern?

final String testInput = "a2.foo";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("a(\\d*)\\.([^\\w])");
Matcher matcher = p.matcher(testInput);
if (matcher.find())
{
    System.out.println("n = " + matcher.group(1));
}
else 
{
    System.out.println("NOT MATCHED");
}

This prints NOT MATCHED, while I expected it to print 2

Upvotes: 1

Views: 109

Answers (1)

anubhava
anubhava

Reputation: 784898

Your regex is wrong as ([^\\w]) will match only one non-word character. You probably wanted more than 1 word character hence (\\w+)

However you can use this lookahead:

Pattern.compile("a(\\d*)(?=\\.)");

Upvotes: 2

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