Regular Expression - Capturing all repeating groups

Question

I have strings like below:

@property.one@some text here@property.two@another optional text here etc

which contains @.+?@ strin

Answer 1

You're right; most regex flavors, Java included, do not allow access to individual matches of a repeated capturing group. (Perl 6 and .NET do allow this, for the record, but that's not helping you).

What else can you do?

Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("@[^@]+@");
Matcher regexMatcher = regex.matcher(subjectString);
while (regexMatcher.find()) {
    // matched text: regexMatcher.group()
    // match start: regexMatcher.start()
    // match end: regexMatcher.end()
} 

That will capture @property.one@, @property.two@ etc. one by one.

Answer 2

If you know that the separator will be @, then why not just use the split method (string.split('@'))?