Question

I am new to regex. I am looking for regular expression which matches following pattern and extract the string,

 key1=test1
 key2="test1" // which will extract test1 stripping quotes
 key3=New test
 key4=New" "test // which will extract New" "test - as it is if the quotes come in between

I tried with \\s*(\\S+)\\s*=\\s*(\\S+*+) , but not sure how to include quotes if present. Any help will be really appreciated.

Answer 1

Here’s a solution without regex to avoid problems with nested quotes:

String extractValue(String input) {
  // check if '=' is present here...
  String[] pair = input.split("=", 2);
  String value = pair[1];
  if (value.startsWith("\"") && value.endsWith("\"")) {
      return value.substring(1, value.length() - 1);
  }
  return value;
}

Basically this is not without regex, because of the use of split(), but it’s not using regex the way you were planning to use it.