Question

I have string which will be in the format of

<!-- accountId="123" activity="add" request="add user" -->

Number of parameters and the order is random.

I need to get the value of request, I need to parse the add user text from the string. What is the best way to do this in Java?

Answer 1

You could parse it using regular expressions, something like this:

public static Map<String, String> parse(String s) {
  Map<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>();
  Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(\\w+)\\s*=\\s*\"(.*?)\"");
  Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
  while (m.find()) {
    map.put(m.group(1), m.group(2));
  }
  return map;
}

With example usage:

String s = "<!-- accountId=\"123\" activity=\"add\" request=\"add user\" -->";
Map<String, String> m = parse(s);
// m => {accountId=123, request=add user, activity=add}
m.get("request"); // => "add user"

If you need to retain the ordering of the attributes you could use a LinkedHashMap or TreeMap, for example.