Question

Having this Pattern for a regular expression :

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[^\\.](?s)executeRule\\(\\s*?(.+?),\\s*?('.+?'),\\s*(\\[.+?\\]\\s*\\);)");

I have a text like :

setSomething(false);
executeRule(document, 'PublishDocumentsToEmail', [
    'xmlMapping':'xmlmapping.TagRegLike',
    'emailAddress':'EMAIL([e-mail])',
    'emailSubject':'Test',
    'emailText':'test',
    'filenameSuffix':'test']
);

System.out.println("bla");

executeRule(document, 'PublishDocumentsToJMS', [
    'xmlMapping':'xmlmapping.TagRegLike',
    'emailAddress':'EMAIL([e-mail])',
    'emailSubject':'Test',
    'emailText':'test',
    'filenameSuffix':'test']
);

I want to find the sequences that contain the executeRule pattern.
My regular expression successfully finds only the first pattern occurence; all the patterns that follow after this first pattern will contain the previous patterns.

E.g. the first time I parse I find

executeRule(document, 'PublishDocumentsToEmail', [
    'xmlMapping':'xmlmapping.TagRegLike',
    'emailAddress':'EMAIL([e-mail])',
    'emailSubject':'Test',
    'emailText':'test',
    'filenameSuffix':'test']
);

I do some replacements on the pattern so it becomes

executeRule(document, 'PublishDocumentsToEmail', [
        'xmlMapping':'xmlmapping.TagRegLike',
        'emailAddress':'EMAIL([e-mail])',
        'emailSubject':'Test',
        'emailText':'test',
        'filenameSuffix':'test']
         ,crs
    );

After this I recursively call the same parsing method with the new text which is

setSomething(false);
executeRule(document, 'PublishDocumentsToEmail', [
    'xmlMapping':'xmlmapping.TagRegLike',
    'emailAddress':'EMAIL([e-mail])',
    'emailSubject':'Test',
    'emailText':'test',
    'filenameSuffix':'test']
    ,crs
);

System.out.println("bla");

executeRule(document, 'PublishDocumentsToJMS', [
    'xmlMapping':'xmlmapping.TagRegLike',
    'emailAddress':'EMAIL([e-mail])',
    'emailSubject':'Test',
    'emailText':'test',
    'filenameSuffix':'test']
);

and my regexp will match the entire section from

executeRule(document, 'PublishDocumentsToEmail', [
    'xmlMapping':'xmlmapping.TagRegLike',
    'emailAddress':'EMAIL([e-mail])',
    'emailSubject':'Test',
    'emailText':'test',
    'filenameSuffix':'test']
    ,crs
);

System.out.println("bla");

executeRule(document, 'PublishDocumentsToJMS', [
    'xmlMapping':'xmlmapping.TagRegLike',
    'emailAddress':'EMAIL([e-mail])',
    'emailSubject':'Test',
    'emailText':'test',
    'filenameSuffix':'test']
);

How can I get it to match only my second pattern ?

Thx

Answer 1

I didn’t thoroughly read your examples but you could either use \G in your pattern to start after the last match or just loop over the matches when using Matcher#find().

Hope that helps.

Update:

After this I recursively call the same parsing method with the new text which is …

Why would you call that recursively? I don’t see any recursion so you might just iterate over the matches you found in the first call.