Question

I have an example dynamic input of information like this:

Xbox 360 (black) Elite Console 120GB (Mason City Illinois ) $200

$200 2013 North Trail Camper (RT 202. Manchester, Maine) $224/mo.

Snowmobile Bike trailers (Winthrop / Augusta) $40 Monthly

“Great Xmas Gift” XBox 360 Guitar Hero (Springfied)

I am trying to use Regex in Android to split the string into three parts:

1. Text before XXX()
2. Text in (XXX)
3. Text after () XXX

Sometimes there won’t be a price, the text after the location in ().

I’ve tried to

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\(([^]*)\)");
Matcher m = p.matcher(title);

But I can’t get matchers to work in Android. It always returns empty when I look in with matcher.group(1). I have it setup currently to look for either ( or $ and explode too give me the separate strings. But this is inaccurate and inefficient.

Any help is apperciated!

Answer 1

I suspect you could do this with a regular expression, but it might be simpler not to.

    String input[] = {
            "Xbox 360 (black) Elite Console 120GB (Mason City Illinois ) $200",
            "$200 2013 North Trail Camper (RT 202. Manchester, Maine) $224/mo.",
            "Snowmobile Bike trailers (Winthrop / Augusta) $40 Monthly",
            "\"Great Xmas Gift\" XBox 360 Guitar Hero (Springfied)"
    };
    for (String s : input) {
        int lastClose = s.lastIndexOf(')');
        int lastOpen = s.lastIndexOf('(', lastClose);
        System.out.println(s.substring(0, lastOpen).trim() +
                "~" + s.substring(lastOpen + 1, lastClose).trim() +
                "~" + s.substring(lastClose + 1).trim());
    }

prints

Xbox 360 (black) Elite Console 120GB~Mason City Illinois~$200
$200 2013 North Trail Camper~RT 202. Manchester, Maine~$224/mo.
Snowmobile Bike trailers~Winthrop / Augusta~$40 Monthly
"Great Xmas Gift" XBox 360 Guitar Hero~Springfied~