Getting the text that follows after the regex match

Question

I\'m new to using Regex, I\'ve been going through a rake of tutorials but I haven\'t found one that applies to what I want to do,

I want to search for something, but

Answer 1

Your regex "sentence(.*)" is right. To retrieve the contents of the group in parenthesis, you would call:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile( "sentence(.*)" );
Matcher m = p.matcher( "some lame sentence that is awesome" );
if ( m.find() ) {
   String s = m.group(1); // " that is awesome"
}

Note the use of m.find() in this case (attempts to find anywhere on the string) and not m.matches() (would fail because of the prefix "some lame"; in this case the regex would need to be ".*sentence(.*)")

Answer 2

You can do this with "just the regular expression" as you asked for in a comment:

(?<=sentence).*

(?<=sentence) is a positive lookbehind assertion. This matches at a certain position in the string, namely at a position right after the text sentence without making that text itself part of the match. Consequently, (?<=sentence).* will match any text after sentence.

This is quite a nice feature of regex. However, in Java this will only work for finite-length subexpressions, i. e. (?<=sentence|word|(foo){1,4}) is legal, but (?<=sentence\s*) isn't.

Answer 3

You just need to put "group(1)" instead of "group()" in the following line and the return will be the one you expected:

System.out.println("I found the text: " + matcher.group(**1**).toString());

Answer 4

if Matcher is initialized with str, after the match, you can get the part after the match with

str.substring(matcher.end())

Sample Code:

final String str = "Some lame sentence that is awesome";
final Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("sentence").matcher(str);
if(matcher.find()){
    System.out.println(str.substring(matcher.end()).trim());
}

Output:

that is awesome

Answer 5

You need to use the group(int) of your matcher - group(0) is the entire match, and group(1) is the first group you marked. In the example you specify, group(1) is what comes after "sentence".