regular expression to detect a tag

Question

I am trying to detect all the paragraphs in this file:

an XML file

to do so I used this code :

    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("<paragraph>\\s*?(.*?)\\s*?(.*?)\\s*?(.*?)</paragraph>");
    Matcher m = p.matcher(ne);
    int occur = 1;

    while(m.find()) {

        System.out.print("Word = " + ne.substring(m.start(), m.end())+"\n");        }


    }

the problem is that it only detects the first paragraph. Help please?

i don'g because it is not an XML file it is a segmented text, can i use it even if it is not ? — Dreamer, May 14 '15 at 19:00
Sure looks like XML (with some HTML-ish entity references which can be taken care of) to me. What is "segmented text" if it's not XML? — Matti Virkkunen, May 14 '15 at 19:01
What do you mean by "segmented text"? It looks like XML to me. — Vivin Paliath, May 14 '15 at 19:02
So how to use it ? XML parser i tried to use a code related to XML but it shows an error that the form is incorrect and it is not XML — Dreamer, May 14 '15 at 19:04
Put an XML decleration and a root tag at the beginning, close the root tag at the end, and you'll be good to go (if all the tags get closed, that is). — RealSkeptic, May 14 '15 at 19:05
would be please recommend me a link or anything thing to start with ? thank you for your help — Dreamer, May 14 '15 at 19:08
About how to detect a tag you can see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9253027/get-everthing-between-tag-and-tag-with-php. — Mihai8, May 14 '15 at 19:23

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 14 '15 at 19:10

2

Here's a one-liner using commons-lang:

String[] paragraphs = StringUtils.substringsBetween(ne, "<paragraph>", "</paragraph>");

answered May 14 '15 at 19:10

Matt Flowers

131
1
6

Matt this is not working for a simple java project because i have to import – Dreamer May 14 '15 at 19:23

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 14 '15 at 20:10

Dreamer, as you said... for a "simple java project":

//import java.util.regex.Matcher;
//import java.util.regex.Pattern;
StringBuilder text = new StringBuilder();
text.append("<html><something>");
text.append("<paragraph><Sentence>text 1 qwe</Sentence></paragraph>");
text.append("<paragraph><Sentence>text 2 qwe</Sentence></paragraph>");
text.append("<zzz>this text wont go</zzz>");
text.append("<paragraph><Sentence>text 3 qwe</Sentence></paragraph>");
text.append("</something></html");
System.out.println(text.toString());

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("<paragraph>(.*?)</paragraph>");
Matcher m = p.matcher(text.toString());

while (m.find()) {
    System.out.print("Word = " + m.group() + "\n");
}

Output:

<html><something><paragraph><Sentence>text 1 qwe</Sentence></paragraph>
<paragraph><Sentence>text 2 qwe</Sentence></paragraph><zzz>this text wont   
go</zzz><paragraph><Sentence>text 3 qwe</Sentence></paragraph></something>  
</html>
Word = <paragraph><Sentence>text 1 qwe</Sentence></paragraph>
Word = <paragraph><Sentence>text 2 qwe</Sentence></paragraph>
Word = <paragraph><Sentence>text 3 qwe</Sentence></paragraph>

Actually my code worked just fine when i changed the regular expression "([\\s\\S]*?)" , thank you for your help ! — Dreamer, May 14 '15 at 20:16

regular expression to detect a tag

2 Answers2