Java & Regular expression

Question

Need help with parsing line where keywords included in brackets [].

I tried but have wrong result:

public class App {
    public static void main(String[] args) {

        Matcher mtr = Pattern.compile("(\\w+-\\w+|\\w+)+").matcher("[foo-bar] [baz][qux]");

        if (mtr.find()) for (int i = 0; i < mtr.groupCount(); i++) {
            System.out.println(mtr.group(i));
        }
    }
}

Result(wrong):

foo-bar

Me need:

foo-bar
baz
qux

What should be regex that parse string as on last example ?

Answer 1

Simply try using String#split() method.

String str = "[foo-bar] [baz][qux]";
String[] array = str.substring(1, str.length() - 1).split("\\]\\s*\\[");

Answer 2

try this

    Matcher mtr = Pattern.compile("[\\w-]+").matcher("[foo-bar] [baz][qux]");
    while(mtr.find()) {
        System.out.println(mtr.group());
    }

Answer 3

Instead of if (mtr.find()):

while (mtr.find())
   for (int i = 0; i < mtr.groupCount(); i++) {
      System.out.println(mtr.group(i));
   }

i.e. you need to call matcher#find() inside a loop to have global matched returned.

Answer 4

try this retular expression

\[[^\[\]]*\]

http://rubular.com/r/heMGeTMjuB

alternatively, this one is similar, and will parse things such as "[foo[bar]" as foo[bar

\[(.*?)\]

http://rubular.com/r/IzPI0RcLmS

Answer 5

As long as your brackets can't be nested, you can try the regex

\[([^\]]*)\]

and extract the first capturing group.

That is:

Matcher mtr = Pattern.compile("\\[([^\\]]*)\\]").matcher("[foo-bar] [baz][qux]");

while (mtr.find())
    System.out.println(mtr.group(1));

foo-bar
baz
qux