Question

I have a webpage converted to a string and I’m trying to extract three numbers from it from this line.

<td class="col_stat">1</td><td class="col_stat">0</td><td class="col_stat">1</td>

From the line above I already have it extracting the first ‘1’ using this

String filePattern = "<td class=\"col_stat\">(.+)</td>";
    pattern = Pattern.compile(filePattern);
    matcher = pattern.matcher(text);
    if(matcher.find()){
        String number = matcher.group(1);
        System.out.println(number);
    }       

Now what I want to do is extract the 0 and the last 1 but anytime I try edit the regular expression above it just outputs the complete webpage on the console. Anyone have any suggestions??
Thanks

Answer 1

Regex matching is greedy, try this instead (looking only for (\d+) instead of (.+) (which matches everything until the last </td>):

String text = 
    "<td class=\"col_stat\">1</td>" + 
    "<td class=\"col_stat\">0</td>" + 
    "<td class=\"col_stat\">1</td>";
String filePattern = "<td class=\"col_stat\">(\\d+)</td>";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(filePattern);
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(text);
while (matcher.find())
{
    String number = matcher.group(1);
    System.out.println(number);
}

On a related note, I completely agree with other’s suggestions to use a more structured approach to interpreting HTML.