Question

Consider the following Pattern :-

aba

And the foll. source string :-

abababbbaba

01234567890    //Index Positions

Using Pattern and Matcher classes from java.util.regex package, finds this pattern only two times since regex does not consider already consumed characters.

What if I want to reuse a part of already consumed characters. That is, I want 3 matches here, one at position 0, one at 2 (which is ignored previously), and one at 8.

How do I do it??

Answer 1

I think you can use the indexOf() for something like that.

String str = "abababbbaba";
        String substr = "aba";
        int location = 0;
        while ((location = str.indexOf(substr, location)) >= 0)
        {
            System.out.println(location);
            location++;
        }

Prints:

0, 2 and 8