Matching a pattern in Java when a few starting characters and a few ending characters are known

Question

I would like to find a pattern which is a string. I know the first few characters of that string. And I also know the set of characters or words the string is ending with. How do I find this pattern? My string is constituted of words and special characters.

My string starts with a special character and ends with a special character followed by any two characters, which are variables.

Answer 1

If you don't know what the special character are and want to find them out from the input you can do

String regex = start + "(.*?)" + end + "(.)(.)"

As @olivier-grégoire points out, this assumes start and end are sufficiently quoted eg use Pattern.quote(String) if you are not sure.

The two characters matched will be in group 2 and 3 when you use a Matcher