带OR选项的字符串的Java子字符串

Question

Let say I have a list of strings like:

List myList = new ArrayList();
myList.add("person [something]");
myList.add("person 'something'");

so in my strings sometimes I have [ and sometimes '

and now I would like to get substrings but I don't know how to do this if I would like to cut my string in one of the two chars. Can anyone tell me whether that option is possible? I tried something like:

List finalOne = new ArrayList();
for(String ss: myList){
finalOne.add(ss.substring("[" || "'" ))

}

I expect to get all substrings starting from char "[" or starting from "'" in one run

Answer 1

You can use (?<=\\[)(.*?)(?=\\]) and (?<=\\')(.*?)(?=\\') regular expressions to find the string between square brackets and single quotes.

You can take a look at this , for searching pattern in java, and this , for the regular expression.

Answer 2

That's just not how substring method works, look at docs ( https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#substring(int) ).

Based on what you want, you can:

1. Use RegEx to get these substrings ( https://www.tutorialspoint.com/java/java_regular_expressions.htm )
2. Split your string on some character, string or pattern ( https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#split(java.lang.String) )
3. Find indexes of substring you need and get it via using substring method