Question

I have some data (to be precise this data comes from Windows Registry), which looks like that:

some data ... PACKAGE_SIZE    REG_SZ    100000\r\n    PATH    REG_SZ    C:\\Some\\path\r\n    VERSION    REG_SZ    1.0.0\r\n some other data...

I need to extract the path from it, so I use a regular expression like that:

(?<=(PATH.*?REG_SZ)).+?(?=\\r\\n)

But it doesn’t work, as I understand because the lookaround is atomic. So far I’m able to use something like that:

(?<=PATH).+?(?=\\r\\n)

what captures

    REG_SZ    C:\\Some\\path

My question is – is this possible to extract the path in one go? (It means without using two regular expressions)

Answer 1

You can try this way

String data="some data ... PACKAGE_SIZE    REG_SZ    100000\r\n    PATH    REG_SZ    C:\\Some\\path\r\n    VERSION    REG_SZ    1.0.0\r\n some other data";
Pattern p=Pattern.compile("PATH\\s+REG_SZ\\s+(.*)\\r\\n");
Matcher m=p.matcher(data);
if (m.find())
    System.out.println(m.group(1));

output: C:\Some\path