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I have a string in a jList that I am looking to split with a regex (for future simplicity if requirements change)

The string looks a lot like this:

ID: GF68464, Name: productname

the ID could be any combination of letters and numbers and could be any length.

I only want the ID to be matched, i.e excluding "ID: " and anything after the comma following the ID.

Here is what I have thus far but it doesn't seem to do what I ask it to

[^ID: ][a-zA-Z1-9][^,^.]

FURTHER INFO (EDIT)

I plan on extracting the ID to match against an array. (hence the need for a regex). Could this be done a different way?

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  • So you just want to match anything after "ID: "? Commented Aug 15, 2013 at 22:46
  • Anything after ID: until a comma is reached (,) Commented Aug 15, 2013 at 22:47

4 Answers 4

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4

You can try this:

ID:\s*(\w+),

and extract the 1st capturing group. You can also use lookarounds (+1 to @p.s.w.g).

String str = "ID: GF68464, Name: productname";

Matcher m = Pattern.compile("ID:\\s*(\\w+),").matcher(str);
if (m.find()) {
    System.out.println(m.group(1));
}

GF68464
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4 Comments

nope, that appears to just match the entire string. Do forgive me if I'm making a faux pas
You can extract just the groups in ()'s using the Matcher.group method - which should include ONLY the parenthesized text, and not the rest of the matched string.
@CameronMiller It matches the entire string, but it captures the ID and the text following the comma in separate groups. You have to use the .group method to extract the relevant capture group.
Did the job. You sir, are a legend.
3

You could try using lookarounds:

(?<ID:\s*)\w+(?=,)

This will match any sequence of one or more word characters preceded by "ID:" and any number of white space characters, and followed by a comma.

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0

What you want is called a non-capturing group. There are already some fairly high-quality examples of doing this in Java on SO - for example, this question: What is a non-capturing group? What does a question mark followed by a colon (?:) mean?

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3 Comments

I believe, s?he needs capturing group.
You could either place the "ID: " portion in a non-capturing group, or place the ID itself in a capture group and then only extract that group from the returned match. Either should work.
I will admit that capture groups are probably the more straight-forward solution, but non-capturing groups are still a handy trick to know.
0

Create a regex like /^[a-z A-Z 0-9]*,/ then use can use match function and use value match[0] like

var regex = /^[a-z A-Z 0-9]*\,/;
var matches = your_string.match(regex);
var required_value = matches[0];

hope this helps

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2 Comments

No, this won't work. It will reject the : in the ID: . You could add it to the character class, but then it would catch a lot more than what OP wanted. Also, you use a start anchor, but OP never said that it should only match the at the start of the string / line. Finally, this appears to be JavaScript, but the question was specifically tagged as Java.
I am sorry I took it a JavaScript query and thanks for clarification

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