CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaregexstring
raghu
raghu

Reputation: 131

Find some text in a string on matching to a reg-ex

I am looking for sentences of the form. "....X is educated at Y..." in third field of each line of a document of text. X is known and Y is the unknown. On a successful match, how can I get the value of Y? Following is my code:

    Pattern p1 = Pattern.compile(".* educated at .*");
    int count = 0;

    while((line = br.readLine()) != null){
        String datavalue[] = line.split("\t");
        String text = datavalue[2];
        Matcher m = p1.matcher(text);
        if(m.matches()){
            count++;
            //System.out.println(text);
            //How do I get Y?

        }
    }

I'm new to reg-ex. Any help is appreciated.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 47

Answers (2)

Bohemian
Bohemian

Reputation: 425033

You can do it in one line:

while((line = br.readLine()) != null){
    String y = line.replaceAll(".*?\t.*?\t{^\t]*educated at (\\w+).*|.*", "$1");

The variable y will be blank if there's no match.

Upvotes: 0

copeg
copeg

Reputation: 8348

Capture the found text as a group:

Pattern p1 = Pattern.compile(".* educated at (.*)");//note the parenthesis
int count = 0;

while((line = br.readLine()) != null){
    String datavalue[] = line.split("\t");
    String text = datavalue[2];
    Matcher m = p1.matcher(text);
    if(m.matches()){
        count++;
        System.out.println(m.group(1));

    }
}

Please see https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/regex/groups.html for more information

Upvotes: 4

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