Question

I have a large string in the following format –

   <a href="12345.html"><a href="12345.html"><a href="12345.html"><a href="12345.html">
   <a href="12345.html"><a href="12345.html"><a href="12345.html"><a href="12345.html">

Id like to store all occurances of the value that occurs before .html. So above html becomes something like 12345.html,12345.html,12345.html,12345.html,12345.html,12345.html,12345.html,12345.html

Do I need a regular expression? or some kind of replace method.

Thanks

Answer 1

You don’t actually need a regular expression, but you could use the underlying Matcher class:

final String searchString = "12345.html";
final String txt =
"<a href=\"12345.html\"><a href=\"12345.html\"><a href=\"12345.html\"><a href=\"12345.html\">\n"
+ "<a href=\"12345.html\"><a href=\"12345.html\"><a href=\"12345.html\"><a href=\"12345.html\">";
final Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile(searchString, Pattern.LITERAL).matcher(txt);
final StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
while(matcher.find()){
    if(sb.length() > 0) sb.append(',');
    sb.append(matcher.group());
}
System.out.println(sb.toString());

Output:

12345.html,12345.html,12345.html,12345.html,12345.html,12345.html,12345.html,12345.html