Regular expression to extract text between and after “||” symbol

Question

I don't have experience with regex in java, but I think that we can solve this using regexp and it can be easier than my examples. I have a text with double || symbols. Text can looks like:
1) aaa||bbb||ccc ,
2) aaa||||ccc ,
3) ||bbb||ccc ,
4) || ||cccc || ||cccc etc.
I want to extract text after first || - bbb , andr after second || - ccc . I did:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("||",Pattern,DOTALL);
String types[] = p.split(stringToParse);

but this is not working when string doesn't have 3 parts.

Second idea is:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("||",Pattern,DOTALL);
Matcher m= p.matcher(strToParse);
while (m.find()) {
 System.out.println(m.group() + " " + m.start() + " " + m.end());
}

then I know when || occures and is possible to do substring. Does exist easier and simpler way to solve this problem?

Answer 1

As above People said don't use it for HTML parser.

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(<br>)\\w*(<br>)");
Matcher m= p.matcher(c);
while (m.find()) {
 System.out.println(m.group().replace("<br>", ""));// replace <br>.
}

Answer 2

This:

String[] data = { 
        "aaa||bbb||ccc", 
        "aaa||||ccc", 
        "||bbb||ccc", 
        "|| ||cccc" 
};
for (String string : data) {
    String[] split = string.split(Pattern.quote("||"));
    System.out.println("0:"+split[0] + ", 1:" + split[1] + " 2:" + split[2]);
}

gives:

0:aaa, 1:bbb 2:ccc
0:aaa, 1: 2:ccc
0:, 1:bbb 2:ccc
0:, 1:  2:cccc

Note the escaping of the regex using Pattern.quote() , as | is a special regex characters .

Answer 3

You've misunderstood the docs for split. This will split the string between on stringToParse:

String types[] = between.split(stringToParse);

You probably want to split the string stringToParse on the sentinel between:

String types[] = stringToParse.split(between);

ex:

String s = "a:b:c";
String letters[] = s.split(":");