Question

Hi guys i’m trying to retrieve the link between this two tag eg text here it will then store it in a list, how do i retrieve those text with the pattern and matcher

public void getlinks() {
    Pattern Start = Pattern.compile(this.PatternStart);  //<Link>
    Pattern End = Pattern.compile(this.PatternEnd);      //</Link>
    Matcher mStart = Start.matcher(this.Source); // matches Start
    Matcher mEnd = End.matcher(this.Source); // matches end

   ????????????
}

Trying to find the link between and inside a html source, just using as an example

Answer 1

In general you do like this:

public static List<String> getLinks(String text) {
    Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("<tagstart>(.*?)<tagend>").matcher(text);
    List<String> linkList = new ArrayList<String>();
    while (matcher.find()) {
        linkList.add(matcher.group(1));
    }
    return linkList;
}

where <tagstart> and <tagend> are your starting and ending tags. The matcher.group(1) gives you everything between the tags, where matcher.group() or matcher.group(0) would give you the tags too.
Note that it is important to use the (.*?) if you have a text with multiple tag pairs, otherwise this will match the first <tagstart> and the last <tagend> and return everything in between.
An example usage would be:

    System.out.println(getLinks("<tagstart>beer<tagend><tagstart>juice<tagend>"));

which prints

[beer, juice]