match() madness

Programming Questions

andre.86

in Programming Questions • 2 years ago

Ok guys I wondered how to separate content in between html-tags and gave up finding a library. So I had to have a look on RegEx. The Processing-reference suggests me to use match(); to find text-patterns.

I will post my not-working-example in here, but maybe I can find someone who can explain me that:

http://processing.org/reference/match_.html tells me that

String s = "Inside a tag, you will find 
                 
                  content
                 ."; String[] m = match(s, "
                 
                  (\\S+)
                 "); println("Found " + m[1] + " inside the tag."); // Prints "Found content inside the tag." to the console

... should print "Found content inside the tag." to the console. Indeed But if I copy'n'paste that code I get "Found Inside inside the tag."

What's going on there?

My second question:

               
                println(m);

... results in:
[0] "Inside"
[1] "Inside"

Shouldn't it be:
[0] "Inside" 
[1] "content"

?

Thanks a lot for your advice,
André

Edit: I am using Processing 1.5 on a Mac.

Replies(4)

kooogy

Re: match() madness

2 years ago

reference does say:

"Element [0] of a regexp match returns the entire matching string, and the match groups start at element [1] (the first group is [1], the second [2], and so on). "

so that second bit is as expected - Inside, Inside.

but the first bit, S+ finds 1 or more non-whitespace characters (see java Pattern doc) so i'd expect that to find 'Inside' rather than 'content'.

i get the same results as you (win7)

PhiLho

Re: match() madness

2 years ago

Using regexes to parse HTML or XML is the worst solution (unless the data is strictly known in advance), as these markup languages have quite complex quoting / escaping rules.
You better use a proper HTML parsing library.

lscarmic

Re: Re: match() madness

2 years ago

Once i get my time data out of XML into, say, a string array, what's the best way to continue parsing it?

Specifically, my time from XML might look something like "2011-01-16T22:08:08Z" which is obviously both time AND date. Is this the point where a regular expression would come in handy (i.e. get stuff between T and Z)?

Thanks!

PhiLho

Re: match() madness

2 years ago

No. See DateFormat Java class.

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match() madness

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