Question

If I have the text

<page a>The cat ran#$(*#(%)#over(*@#$the(*#%

and am using a scanner and the useDelimiter method, what regex would allow me to extract:

<page a>
The
cat
ran
over
the

So far I have tried:

s.useDelimiter("[^a-zA-Z]|^(<.*>$)");

but that does not leave angle brackets intact, it takes them out (obviously as it matches the a-zA-Z instead.

Answer 1

The problem is not one of delimiters, so much as it is one of token recognition. Your tokens are:

• <page a>
• The
• cat
• ran
• over
• the

Encoding the “<” characters anywhere in the set of delimiters pretty much ensures that they won’t be in the returned tokens. If you know that the <page a> occurs at the beginning of the string somewhere (and I realize that might be an invalid assumption), you can do something like this:

Scanner s = new Scanner(...);
s.useDelimiter("[^\\w]");
// Find an angle bracket token, if one is next.
String token = s.findInLine("<[^.]*>");
if (token != null)
    // process angle bracket token
token = s.next(); // get next delimited token
...

Obviously, that’s a quick hack (though I did test it). But you could easily extend it, I think.