CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaregex
ss123
ss123

Reputation: 61

What would be the Java regex for this pattern?

My strings look like:

some space delimited fixed text: space delimited text: space delimited text...

Example string:

"Mary had a little lamb: it says: baah..."

Here, "Mary had a little lamb: " string is a constant. It will always be followed by a string which contains alpha numeric characters, colon and space followed by ellipsis. "it says: baah" may change. ... will always be there.

I have this so far as regex:

"Mary had a little lamb: ^[a-zA-Z:]\\.\\.\\."

but this doesn't work.

I don't know how to incorporate the space after colon in "it says: baah". How do I have to write a regular expression that recognizes these strings?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 88

Answers (1)

clemens
clemens

Reputation: 17721

You shouldn't use the beginning operator inside of your regex and your string may include other characters than letters. Try:

"Mary had a little lamb: .*?\\.\\.\\."

The question mark is for non greedy / shortest possible matches. You may remove it to receive longest possible matches.

This more specific pattern requires a colon and restricts the possible characters: 

"Mary had a little lamb: [^:]*:[ A-Za-z]*\\.\\.\\."

The [^:]* matches any string that doesn't contain a colon.

For testing in Java (Bean Shell):

p = java.util.regex.Pattern.compile("Mary had a little lamb: [^:]*:[ A-Za-z]*\\.\\.\\.");
m = p.matcher("Mary had a little lamb: it says: baah...");
print(m.matches());

Upvotes: 2

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