Question

How would I “find” and “get” a value between two strings?

ie: <a>3</a>

I’m reading a file to find the location of <a>, where that starts, then it will stop reading when it finds </a> The value I want to return is “3”.

Using JRE 6

Answer 1

Your two main options are:

1) preferred but potentially complicated: using an XML/HTML parser and getting the text within the first “a” element. e.g. using Jsoup (thanks @alpha123):

Jsoup.parse("<a>3</a>").select("a").first().text(); // => "3"

2) easier but not very reliable: using a regular expression to extract the characters between the <a> and </a> strings. e.g.:

String s = "<a>3</a>";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("<a>(.*?)</a>")
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
if (m.find()) {
  System.out.println(m.group(1)); // => "3"
}