Question

In this program I’m parsing input into integers and I can’t seem to be able to take in negative numbers and have tried a bunch of regular expressions. I can get positive integers no problem by removing the &&^- it’s just the negative integers I’m having problems with.

Example:

input = console.readLine("?> ").split("\\D+&&^-");

Any idea and what I’m doing wrong? Thanks for any help in advance.

Sample input:
-7 * 4

Output:
-7 and 4 should be stored into an array of strings.

Answer 1

&& is not an “and” operator inside a regular expression. I figure you meant to use [^0-9-]+, right?

I recommend matching instead of splitting. However, neither will trivially solve the corner case of -12-34 for you. Splitting will give you a single, non-parseable number. Matching with -?\d+ will give you two numbers, with nothing inbetween (you could treat that as a default + though).