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matching substrings between square brackets using regular expressions

807588Jun 16 2009 — edited Jun 16 2009
Hello,

I am new at Java and have a problem with regular expressions. Let me describe the issue in 3 steps:

1.- I have an english sentence. Some words of the sentence stand between square brackets, for example "I [eat] and [sleep]"
2- I would like to match strings that are in square brackets using regular expressions (java.util.regex.*;) and here is the code I have written for the task

+Pattern findStringinSquareBrackets = Pattern.compile("\\[.*\\]");+
+ Matcher matcherOfWordInSquareBrackets = findStringinSquareBrackets.matcher("I [eat] and [sleep]");+
+//Iteration in the string+
+ while ( matcherOfWordInSquareBrackets.find() )+
+{+
+ System.out.println("Patter found! :"+ outputField.getText().substring(matcherOfWordInSquareBrackets.start(), matcherOfWordInSquareBrackets.end())+""); +
+ }+
3- the result I have after running the code described in 2 is the following: *Patter found!: [eat] and [sleep]*
That is to say that not only words between square brackets are found but also the substring "and". And this is not what I want.

What I would like to have as a result is:
*Patter found!: [eat]*
*Patter found!: [sleep]*
That is to say I want to match only the words between the square brackets and nothing else.

Does somebody know how to do this? Any help would be great.
Best regards,

Abou
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Locked on Jul 14 2009
Added on Jun 16 2009
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