Need a little help on this regular expression

Question

I have a Java string which looks like this, it is actually an XML tag:

"article-idref="527710" group="no" height="267" href="pc011018.pct" id="pc011018" idref="169419" print-rights="yes" product="wborc" rights="licensed" type="photo" width="322" "

Now I want to remove the article-idref="52770" segment by using regular expression, I came up with the following one:

trimedString.replaceAll("\\article-idref=.*?\"","");

but it doesn't seem to work, could anybody give me an idea on where I got wrong in my regular expression? I need this to be represented as a String in my Java class, so probably HTMLParser won't help me a lot here. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

尝试这个：

trimedString.replaceAll("article-idref=\"[^\"]*\" *","");

Answer 2

I corrected the regular expression by adding quotes and a word boundary (to prevent false matches). Also, in case you didn't, remember to reassign to your string after the replacement:

trimmedString = trimmedString.replaceAll("\\barticle-idref=\".*?\"", "");

See it working at ideone .

Also since this is from an XML document it might be better to use an XML parser to extract the correct attributes instead of a regular expression. This is because XML is quite a complex data format to parse correctly. The example in your question is simple enough. However a regular expression could break on a more complex case, such as a document that includes XML comments. This could be an issue if you are reading data from an untrusted source.

Answer 3

if you are sure the article-idref is allways at the beginning try this:

// removes everything from the beginning to the first whitespace
trimedString = trimedString.replaceFirst("^\\s","");

Be sure to assign the result to trimedString again, since replace does not midify the string itself but returns another string.