Regex for text between last valid parenthesis

Question

I need to use regex for following text. The parenthesis are not nested.

{ ... bla ... {text} jdjdj ... { kdkdkdkd aaa { abc }

if I use \\{(.*?)\\} then there is two groups:

... bla ... {text
kdkdkdkd aaa { abc

But I need

text
abc

Is it possible to write such Regex in Java ?

EDIT : The actually parenthesis are @{ and }@~enc~

Actual string:

@{ ... bla ... @{text}@~enc~ jdjdj ... @{ kdkdkdkd aaa @{ abc }@~enc~

Answer 1

Case 1. Single-character delimiters

You need to use a negated character class [^{}] :

\{([^{}]*)}

The [^{}] character class matches any character but { and } .

Java demo :

String s = "{ ... bla ... {text} jdjdj ... { kdkdkdkd aaa { abc }";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\{([^{}]*)}");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(s);
while (matcher.find()){
    System.out.println(matcher.group(1).trim()); 
} 

Note that you can use String#trim() to get rid of trailing/leading whitespace in your captures.

Case 2. Multi-character delimiters

To match text between multi-character delimiters, you can use a tempered greedy token :

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("(?s)@\\{((?:(?!@\\{|}@~enc~).)*)}@~enc~");
                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

See another demo . The (?s) modifier (equal to setting the Pattern.DOTALL flag) makes a . match newlines, too.

NB: Do not forget to escape the { symbol in Java regex, and you do not have to escape } .