Question

I’m terrible at Regex and would greatly appreciate any help with this issue, which I think will be newb stuff for anyone familiar.

I’m getting a response like this from a REST call

    {"responseData":{"translatedText":"Ciao mondo"},"responseDetails":"","responseStatus":200,"matches":[{"id":"424913311","segment":"Hello World","translation":"Ciao mondo","quality":"74","reference":"","usage-count":50,"subject":"All","created-by":"","last-updated-by":null,"create-date":"2011-12-29 19:14:22","last-update-date":"2011-12-29 19:14:22","match":1},{"id":"0","segment":"Hello World","translation":"Ciao a tutti","quality":"70","reference":"Machine Translation provided by Google, Microsoft, Worldlingo or the MyMemory customized engine.","usage-count":1,"subject":"All","created-by":"MT!","last-updated-by":null,"create-date":"2012-05-14","last-update-date":"2012-05-14","match":0.85}]}

All I need is the ‘Ciao mondo’ in between those quotations. I was hoping with Java’s Split feature I could do this but unfortunately it doesn’t allow two separate delimiters as then I could have specified the text before the translation.

To simplify, what I’m stuck with is the regex to gather whatever is inbetween translatedText”:” and the next “

I’d be very grateful for any help

Answer 1

You can use \"translatedText\":\"([^\"]*)\" expression to capture the match.

The expression meaning is as follows: find quoted translatedText followed by a colon and an opening quote. Then match every character before the following quote, and capture the result in a capturing group.

String s = " {\"responseData\":{\"translatedText\":\"Ciao mondo\"},\"responseDetails\":\"\",\"responseStatus\":200,\"matches\":[{\"id\":\"424913311\",\"segment\":\"Hello World\",\"translation\":\"Ciao mondo\",\"quality\":\"74\",\"reference\":\"\",\"usage-count\":50,\"subject\":\"All\",\"created-by\":\"\",\"last-updated-by\":null,\"create-date\":\"2011-12-29 19:14:22\",\"last-update-date\":\"2011-12-29 19:14:22\",\"match\":1},{\"id\":\"0\",\"segment\":\"Hello World\",\"translation\":\"Ciao a tutti\",\"quality\":\"70\",\"reference\":\"Machine Translation provided by Google, Microsoft, Worldlingo or the MyMemory customized engine.\",\"usage-count\":1,\"subject\":\"All\",\"created-by\":\"MT!\",\"last-updated-by\":null,\"create-date\":\"2012-05-14\",\"last-update-date\":\"2012-05-14\",\"match\":0.85}]}";
System.out.println(s);
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\"translatedText\":\"([^\"]*)\"");
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
if (!m.find()) return;
System.out.println(m.group(1));

This fragment prints Ciao mondo.