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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T08:55:58+00:00

So I come from a C background (originally originally, though I haven’t used that

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So I come from a C background (originally originally, though I haven’t used that language for almost 5 years) and I’m trying to parse some values from a string in Java. In C I would use sscanf. In Java people have told me “use Scanner, or StringTokenizer”, but I can’t see how to use them to achieve my purpose.

My input string looks like “17-MAR-11 15.52.25.000000000”. In C I would do something like:

sscanf(thestring, "%d-%s-%d %d.%d.%d.%d", day, month, year, hour, min, sec, fracpart);

But in Java, all I can do is things like:

scanner.nextInt();

This doesn’t allow me to check the pattern, and for “MAR” I end up having to do things like:

str.substring(3,6);

Horrible! Surely there is a better way?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The problem is Java hasn’t out parameters (or passing by reference) as C or C#.

    But there is a better way (and more solid). Use regular expressions:

    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(\\d+)-(\\p{Alpha}+)-(\\d+) (\\d+)\\.(\\d+)\\.(\\d+)\\.(\\d+)")
Matcher m = p.matcher("17-MAR-11 15.52.25.000000000");
day = m.group(1);
month= m.group(2);
....

    Of course C code is more concise, but this technique has one profit:
    Patterns specifies format more precise than ‘%s’ and ‘%d’. So you can use \d{2} to specify that day MUST be compose of exactly 2 digits.

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