Question

I have a string that matches this regular expression: ^.+:[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)*/[0-9]+$ which can easily be visualized as (Text):(Double)/(Int). I need to split this string into the three parts. Normally this would be easy, except that the (Text) may contain colons, so I cannot split on any colon – but rather the last colon.

The .* is greedy so it already does a pretty neat job of doing this, but this wont work as a regular expression into String.split() because it will eat my (Text) as part of the delimiter. Ideally I’d like to have something that would return a String[] with three strings. I’m 100% fine with not using String.split() for this.

Answer 1

Why don’t you just use a straight up regular expression?

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("^(.*):([\\d\\.]+)/(\\d+)$");
Matcher m = p.matcher( someString );
if (m.find()) {
  m.group(1); // returns the text before the colon
  m.group(2); // returns the double between the colon and the slash
  m.group(3); // returns the integer after the slash
}

Or similar. The pattern ^(.*):([\d\.]+)/(\d+)$ assumes that you actually have values in all three positions, and will allow just a period/fullstop in the double position, so you may want to tweak it to your specifications.