Extracting a substring based on second occurence using Java - substringBetween() function

Question

I have the following string "If this is good and if that is bad". The requirement is to extract the string "that" from the main string.

Using

substringBetween(mainString, "If", "is") returns the string "this".

Could you please help in extracting the required string in this case. If this is not possible using the function substringBetween(), is there any alternative string function to achieve this?

This is not my actual string. The actual string is an xml converted to string(there is no possibility to convert it back to xml as it is received from another tool). There are child nodes with repeating information. (Say, multiple flight segments within a travel segment). Hence the question. — Vidya Shankar NS, Jun 27 '17 at 07:45

ΦXocę 웃 Пepeúpa ツ · Answer 1 · 2017-06-27T07:50:50.427

0

you mean StringUtils.substringBetween(foo, "if", "is") instead of StringUtils.substringBetween(foo, "If", "is") because the method substringBetween is case sensitive operation

and searching between "If" and "is" is not the same result as between "if" and "is"

String foo = "If this is good and if that is bad";
String bar = StringUtils.substringBetween(foo, "if", "is");
// String bar = StringUtils.substringBetween(foo, "If", "is");
System.out.println(bar);

edited Jun 27 '17 at 07:50

answered Jun 27 '17 at 07:44

ΦXocę 웃 Пepeúpa ツ

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My bad, I will provide a better mainString to illustrate. Consider String foo = "and If this is good and If that is good". I need to extract "that" by giving only the immediate predecessor and successor as the inputs in substringBetween() – Vidya Shankar NS Jun 27 '17 at 07:49

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 27 '17 at 07:51

0

You can use regex and Pattern matching to extract it, e.g.:

String s = "If this is good and if that is bad";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("if(.*?)is");
Matcher m = pattern.matcher(s);
if(m.find()){
    System.out.println(m.group(1).trim());
}

answered Jun 27 '17 at 07:51

Darshan Mehta

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I did try the above, String s = "If this is good and If that is bad"; Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("if(.*?)is"); Matcher m = pattern.matcher(s); if(m.find()){ System.out.println(m.group(1).trim()); } The output i get is "this" not "that". Any idea how to modify this so that it will return an array or a list of all elements that satisfy the regex? – Vidya Shankar NS Jun 27 '17 at 08:07
@VidyaShankarNS Instead if using `if(m.find()){`try using `while(m.find()){`, it will print all the matches. – Darshan Mehta Jun 27 '17 at 08:26
Thanks a lot for understanding my problem. This was what I wanted. Thanks again!! – Vidya Shankar NS Jun 27 '17 at 08:30

Extracting a substring based on second occurence using Java - substringBetween() function

2 Answers2