Question

Say I have a regular expression like the fowllowing:
{“(group 1) | (group 2) (group 3) |….( group n)”}
to match an input String object, if it matches successfully, how can I know which group among above n groups is acturally matches this String object?
What I am using is regex lib in java.util.
Thank you guys.

Answer 1

Here’s a way:

import java.util.regex.*;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String text = "12 ab ^&";
        String regex = "(\\d+)|([a-z]+)|(\\p{Punct}+)";
        Matcher m = Pattern.compile(regex).matcher(text);
        while(m.find()) {
            System.out.println("\nmatched text: "+m.group());
            for(int i = 1; i <= m.groupCount(); i++) {
                System.out.println("   group "+i+"? "+(m.group(i) != null));
            }
        }
    }
}

output:

matched text: 12
   group 1? true
   group 2? false
   group 3? false

matched text: ab
   group 1? false
   group 2? true
   group 3? false

matched text: ^&
   group 1? false
   group 2? false
   group 3? true