Question

I’ve a strange behaviour with regexp pattern matching

The regexp is that:

String regexp = "<h3.*>(.*)</h3>";

I’ve a first case:

<h3 class="pubAdTitleBlock">Title</h3>

In this case, all is ok, matcher.group(1) give me the ‘Title’

I a Second case, i’ve a link nested into h3, like this:

<h3 class="pubAdTitleBlock "><a href="myLink" title="title">Title</a></h3>

This is the Problem

In this case
– matcher.find() is true,
– matcher.group(0) is the full string,
– but matcher.group(1) is an empty string

why ?

I need to extract title inside <h3 ..>title</h3>, and inside <h3 ...><a ...>title</a></h3>

Answer 1

The first .* will capture " class="pubAdTitleBlock "><a href="myLink" title="title">Title</a", leaving only the zero-width space between </a> and </h3> for the capturing group.

You’ll want to change it to something like [^>]* (i.e. “anything except >”).