Question

I’m looking for a regular expression, but can’t find.

Parsing a text file looking like that

    <resource name="/_op_sox/Project/Default/ICDocumentation/Evaluation/Allianz/Allianz SE/Eval_01241.txt"
              inheritAcls="true">
        <bundle name="AZEvaluation">
            <property name="End Date">
            </property>
            <property name="Evaluation Type">
                <propertyValue name="RCSA"/>
            </property>
        </bundle>
    </resource>
    <resource name="/_op_sox/Project/Default/ICDocumentation/Evaluation/Allianz/Allianz SE/Eval_01481.txt"
              inheritAcls="true">
        <bundle name="AZEvaluation">
            <property name="End Date">
            </property>
            <property name="Evaluation Type">
                <propertyValue name="TRA"/>
            </property>
        </bundle>
    </resource>
   <resource name="/_op_sox/Project/Default/ICDocumentation/Evaluation/Allianz/Allianz SE/Eval_01362.txt"
              inheritAcls="true">
        <bundle name="AZEvaluation">
            <property name="End Date">
            </property>
            <property name="Evaluation Type">
                <propertyValue name="RCSA"/>
            </property>
        </bundle>
    </resource>

My current regex matches to much.

<resource.+?<propertyValue name="RCSA".+?</resource>

It matches the first resource tag and the second + third.
Can somebody change the regex that it really stops at the first </resource>

I use this Java code

Pattern.compile("<resource.+?<propertyValue name=\"RCSA\".+?</resource>",Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL)

Answer 1

I solved it with this Expression: <resource(?:(?!<propertyValue).)+<propertyValue name="RCSA"(?:(?!<resource).)+</resource> but it’s to slow.
So I looked a bit around what else can be done in Java and found an easy and fast solution.

    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("<resource name=.+?</resource>",
            Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL);
    String in = getStringFromFile(path, name, pre, count);
    System.out.println("Länge: " + in.length());
    Matcher m = p.matcher(in);
    StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
    int c = 0;
    while (m.find()) {
        m.appendReplacement(sb, getReplacementStage1(m, c++));
    }
    m.appendTail(sb);
    writeStringToFile(path, name, pre, count, sb.toString());

So first I use an easier and faster RegEx and then instead of using String.replaceAll I use the matcher to have the chance to calculate the replacement for every find.

private static String getReplacementStage1(Matcher m, int c) {
    Pattern p1 = Pattern.compile(
            "<resource[^>]*?contentType=\"Evaluation\"", Pattern.MULTILINE
                    | Pattern.DOTALL);
    Matcher m1 = p1.matcher(m.group());
    if (!m1.find()) {
        // remove
        return "";
    }
    Pattern p2 = Pattern.compile("<propertyValue name=\"(?:RCSA|TRA)\"",
            Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL);
    Matcher m2 = p2.matcher(m.group());
    if (m2.find()) {
        // remove
        return "";
    }
    // no change, return the group
    return m.group();
}

So may be this solution helps somebody with a similar problem, that don’t likes/needs an XML parser…