CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexstringscala
saadi
saadi

Reputation: 714

How to get all sub-strings of a specific format from a string

I have a large string and I want to get all sub-strings of format [[someword]] from it.
Meaning, get all words (list) which are wrapped in opening and closing square brackets.

Now one way to do this is splitting string by space and then filtering the list with this filter but the problem is some times [[someword]] does not exist as a word, it might have a ,, space or . right before of after it.

What is the best way to do this?

I will appreciate a solution in Scala but as this is more of a programming problem, I will convert your solution to Scala if it's in some other language I know e.g. Python.

This question is different from marked duplicate because the regex needs to able to accommodate characters other than English characters in between the brackets.

Upvotes: 6

Views: 909

Answers (2)

Krzysztof Atłasik
Krzysztof Atłasik

Reputation: 22595

Scala solution:

val text = "[[someword1]] test [[someword2]] test 1231"

val pattern = "\\[\\[(\\p{L}+)]\\]".r //match words with brackets and get content with group
val values = pattern
   .findAllIn(text)
   .matchData
   .map(_.group(1)) //get 1st group
   .toList

println(values)

Upvotes: 2

Pushpesh Kumar Rajwanshi
Pushpesh Kumar Rajwanshi

Reputation: 18357

You can use this (?<=\[{2})[^[\]]+(?=\]{2}) regex to match and extract all the words you need that are contained in double square brackets.

Here is a Python solution,

import re

s = 'some text [[someword]] some [[some other word]]other text '
print(re.findall(r'(?<=\[{2})[^[\]]+(?=\]{2})', s))

Prints,

['someword', 'some other word']

I never worked in Scala but here is a solution in Java and as I know Scala is based upon Java only hence this may help.

String s = "some text [[someword]] some [[some other word]]other text ";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(?<=\\[{2})[^\\[\\]]+(?=\\]{2})");
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
while(m.find()) {
    System.out.println(m.group());
}

Prints,

someword
some other word

Let me know if this is what you were looking for.

Upvotes: 3

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