I have a String which is formatted as such
[dgdds,dfse][fsefsf,sefs][fsfs,fsef]
How would I use Regex to quickly parse this to return an ArrayList with each value containing one "entry" as such?
ArrayList <String>: 0(String): [dgdds,dfse] 1(String): [fsefsf,sefs] 2(String): [fsfs,fsef] Really stuck with this, any help would be great.
How about
String myData = "[dgdds,dfse][fsefsf,sefs][fsfs,fsef]"; List<String> list = new ArrayList<>(Arrays.asList(myData .split("(?<=\\])"))); for (String s : list) System.out.println(s); Output:
[dgdds,dfse] [fsefsf,sefs] [fsfs,fsef] This regex will use look behind mechanism to split on each place after ].
You should try this regex :
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\[\\w*,\\w*\\]");
Old, easy, awesome way :)
String s = "[dgdds,dfse][fsefsf,sefs][fsfs,fsef]"; String[] token = s.split("]"); for (String string : token) { System.out.println(string + "]"); } You can use simple \[.*?\] regex, which means: match a string starting with [, later zero or more characters (but as short as possible, not greedly, that's why the ? in .*?), ending with ].
This works, you can test it on Ideone:
List<String> result = new ArrayList<String>(); String input = "[dgdds,dfse][fsefsf,sefs][fsfs,fsef]"; Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\[.*?\\]"); Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(input); while (matcher.find()) { result.add(matcher.group()); } System.out.println(result); Output:
[[dgdds,dfse], [fsefsf,sefs], [fsfs,fsef]] You may need to do it in two passes:
(1) Split out by the brackets if it's just a 1D array (not clear in the question):
String s = "[dgdds,dfse][fsefsf,sefs][fsfs,fsef]"; String[] sArray = s.split("\\[|\\]\\[|\\]"); (2) Split by the commas if you want to also divide, say "dgdds,dfse"
sArray[i].split(","); We can use split(regex) function directly by escaping "]": "\\]" and then use it as the regex for pattern matching:
String str = "[dgdds,dfse][fsefsf,sefs][fsfs,fsef]"; String bal[] = str.split("\\]"); ArrayList<String>finalList = new ArrayList<>(); for(String s:bal) { finalList.add(s+"]"); } System.out.println(finalList); 