Regex to find matches in a multi-line string after a certain phrase

Question

The content that I'm working on:

dontAccessMe:
abc
def

accessMe:
xyz
xyzt
foo
bar

I need to capture 3-letter words in the lines that are below the phrase accessMe: . Which are: xyz foo bar .

How do I go about achieving this?

I've tried (?<=accessMe:)\s*(\w{3}) and it stops after the first matching word.

The language that I'm writing the regex in is Java 15.

Answer 1

You don't need Regex here. Use the advantage that Java gives you. Assuming the input is a String, you can use Stream#dropWhile method after you split the String by the new-line delimiter \n .

Arrays.stream(string.split("\\n"))                // split each line to a String
      .dropWhile(str -> !str.equals("accessMe:")) // ignore until "accessMe:" is reached
      .skip(1)                                    // skip "accessMe:" itself
      .forEach(System.out::println);              // print them out or collect

If the input is List<String> itself, you can call directly .stream().dropWhile(..) on it with no split.

I need to capture 3-letter word

You can use an additional filter if you are really restricted to match only three-letter words. Place it after the skip method call:

      .filter(str -> str.length() == 3)