Extracting Tokens out of a String using REGEX in Java

Question

I have an HTML string (in German) like this:

<li>Peter Goldberg Dr. , Brünner Straße 19, A-1210, Tel +43-1-1234567 (N)</li>

It consists of 3 parts:

name of the person ("Peter Goldberg Dr.")
the address of the person ("Brünner Straße 19, A-1210")
and the tel no of the person or simply the rest of the string ("Tel +43-1-1234567 (N)")

I need to split the whole string into these 3 components without the HTML list tags <li> and </li>.

I am trying it with Pattern and Matcher classes, but I am doing something wrong for sure.

    Pattern myPattern = Pattern.compile("<li>.+,.+Tel.+</li>");
    Matcher mat = myPattern.matcher(eingabe[0]);

    while (mat.find()) {
        System.out.println(mat.group(0));
    }

Could someone please help?

Thanks a lot!!

The answers will tell you how to get those particular fields out of that particular string, but so what? Most regexes are meant to be used on other input strings, and just giving one example leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Will the address always have exactly one comma in the middle? Or can it have 0 or 2 or more? Does the telephone number always start with Tel? Can the person's name or telephone number have a comma in it? Depending on the answers to those questions, the posted answers may not be correct. — ajb
– ajb, Commented Aug 20, 2014 at 23:31

Federico Piazza · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-20 22:55:40Z

1

You can use this regex:

<li>(.*?), (.*), (.*)<\/li>

Working demo

enter image description here

MATCH 1
1.  [4-23]  `Peter Goldberg Dr. `
2.  [25-50] `Brünner Straße 19, A-1210`
3.  [52-78] `Tel +43-1-1234567 (N)`

answered Aug 20, 2014 at 22:55

Federico Piazza

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3 Comments

user3704589 Over a year ago

Thank you Rod_Algonquin and Fede!

user3704589 Over a year ago

There is something I still have to mention: In the second component (address) there can be any number of commas (,). I am not sure if this changes anything in your answers!

Federico Piazza Over a year ago

@user3704589 I know that's why I used a greedy operator. Using this the greedy operator will ignore all commans except the latest one which is the separator between address and telephone.

Rod_Algonquin · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-20 22:50:36Z

1

You can use this regex to get all the elements inside the li tag and split it:

String s = "<li>Peter Goldberg Dr. , Brünner Straße 19, A-1210, Tel +43-1-1234567 (N)</li>";
   Pattern myPattern = Pattern.compile("<li>(.*)</li>");
   Matcher mat = myPattern.matcher(s);
   String [] array;
   while (mat.find()) {
       array = mat.group(1).split(",");
       System.out.println("Name: " + array[0]);
       System.out.println("Address: " + array[1] + "," + array[2]);
       System.out.println("Telephone: " + array[3]);

   }

result:

Name: Peter Goldberg Dr. 
Address:  Brünner Straße 19, A-1210
Telephone: Tel +43-1-1234567 (N)

answered Aug 20, 2014 at 22:50

Rod_Algonquin

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