Question

So, I’m looking to extract words (or phrases) within quotation marks (“) out of a string.
For example suppose the main string is:
The quick brown fox "jumped over" the "lazy" dog
I’d like to be able to extract out and store in variables the words/phrases in quotes, i.e.
jumped over
lazy
should be stored in variables. The input strings will only double quotes when quoting (no single quotes).
I tried the following (rough) code for this:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\s\"(.*?)\"\\s");
Matcher m = p.matcher(<String>);
Variable.add(m.group(1));

It’s throwing an IllegalStateException no matter what I input in. I have a feeling my regex is not working properly.
Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

Your code lacks some if( m.matches()) or m.find() which do the job…

This code:

String in = "The quick brown fox \"jumped over\" the \"lazy\" dog";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile( "\"([^\"]*)\"" );
Matcher m = p.matcher( in );
while( m.find()) {
   System.err.println( m.group( 1 ));
}

outputs:

jumped over
lazy