Question

I have strings of the form:

"abc" 1 2 1 13 
"efgh" 2 5 

Basically, a string in quotes followed by numbers separated by whitespace characters.
I need to extract the string and the numbers out of the line.

So for eg., for the first line, I’d want

• abc to be stored in a String variable (i.e. without the quotations) and
• an array of int to store [1,2,1,13].

I tried to create a pattern that’d do this, but I’m a little confused.

Pattern P = Pattern.compile("\A\".+\"(\s\d+)+");

Not sure how to proceed now. I realized that with this pattern I’d kinda be extracting the whole line out? Perhaps multiple patterns would help?

Pattern P1 = Pattern.compile("\A\".+\"");
Pattern P2 = Pattern.compile("(\s\d+)+");

Again, not very sure how to get the string and ints out of the line though. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

I would rather just split the string on space, rather than building complex regex, and use it with Pattern and Matcher class.

Something like this: –

String str = "\"abc\" 1 2 1 13 ";
String[] arrr = str.split("\\s");
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(arrr));

OUTPUT: –

["abc", 1, 2, 1, 13]

Shows your intent much clearer, that what you want to do.

Then, you can get the string and integer parts from your string array. You would need to do a Integer.parseInt() on integer elements.

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If your string may contain spaces in it, then in that case, you would need a Regex. Better one would be the one in @m.buettner's answer