Question

I have some output, which looks like this:

blah blah garbage text
more garbage text which doesn’t matter
Duration: 00:02:55.34, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 4097 kb/s
some more garbage text
even more garbage text

In java, I’m using a regular expression to turn this line into plain old
00:02:55.34
but it is not replacing the lines at the top and bottom. Using this line of code:

String durationString = s.replaceAll(".*Duration: (\\d\\d:\\d\\d:\\d\\d(\\.\\d\\d?)?).*", "$1");  

results in this:

blah blah garbage text
more garbage text which doesn’t matter
00:02:55.34
some more garbage text
even more garbage text

Apparently, the .*’s aren’t grabbing the newlines as it only replaced text on the same line.

1. How can I make the .*’s grab over newlines?
2. If 1. isn’t possible, is there any way to do what I need, assuming I don’t know how many lines of garbage text are at the top and bottom?

Answer 1

You need to set the dot-all flag:

String durationString = s.replaceAll("(?s).*Duration: (\\d\\d:\\d\\d:\\d\\d(\\.\\d\\d?)?).*", "$1");