Question

I have a String which contains formatted currency values like 45,890.00 and multiple values seperated by comma like 45,890.00,12,345.00,23,765.34,56,908.50 ..

I want to extract and process all the currency values, but could not figure out the correct regular expression for this, This is what I have tried

public static void main(String[] args) {
    String currencyValues = "45,890.00,12,345.00,23,765.34,56,908.50";
    String regEx = "\\.[0-9]{2}[,]";
    String[] results = currencyValues.split(regEx);
    //System.out.println(Arrays.toString(results));
    for(String res : results) {
        System.out.println(res);
    }
}

The output of this is:

45,890 //removing the decimals as the reg ex is exclusive
12,345
23,765
56,908.50

Could someone please help me with this one?

Answer 1

You need a regex “look behind” (?<=regex), which matches, but does consume:

String regEx = "(?<=\\.[0-9]{2}),";

Here’s your test case now working:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    String currencyValues = "45,890.00,12,345.00,23,765.34,56,908.50";
    String regEx = "(?<=\\.[0-9]{2}),"; // Using the regex with the look-behind
    String[] results = currencyValues.split(regEx);
    for (String res : results) {
        System.out.println(res);
    }
}

Output:

45,890.00
12,345.00
23,765.34
56,908.50