Question

I would like someone to help me to rectify my regular expression to split this string:

{constraint.null.invalid}{0,1,2}

Basically, I want anything inside { and }, so my output must be:

• constraint.null.invalid
• 0,1,2.

My regular expression, which I’ve tried closely is:

\{([\S]+)\}

But the value I get is:

constraint.null.invalid}{0,1,2

What am I missing?

Sample code:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\{([\\S]+)\\}", Pattern.MULTILINE);
    String test = "{constraint.null.invalid}{0,1,2}";
    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(test);
    while (matcher.find()) {
        System.out.println(matcher.group(1));
    }
}

Thanks

---

PS: The string can contain values bounded by 1 or more { and }.

Answer 1

The + quantifier is greedy. Use +? for the reluctant version.

See http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/regex/quant.html for details.