Substring a string from both end in java

Question

Android development.

The response is like this:

 <div id="Song" data-airtime="14:12:52" data-runtime="207.25">
 <span id="artist">Weeknd</span><span id="titl">Can't Feel My Face</span></div>

I need the artist, and the title. The problem with the substring indexof(value) method, that the response lenght not a fixed sized, for example, if the artist name is longer.. etc..

How to substring or split to match the correct form?

I tried the left side is ok.

 String left = name.substring(name.indexOf("artist\">")+8);

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 06 '16 at 12:51

1

You don't want to split the string up by hand. As you see, lengths are variable and you can't predict many things.

The link below has many solutions to parsing HTML.

How to use regular expressions to parse HTML in Java?

answered Oct 06 '16 at 12:51

Shmuel

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This is more like a duplicate comment ;) – AxelH Oct 06 '16 at 12:52
Yah .. lol. ... – Shmuel Oct 06 '16 at 12:52
thanks @Shmuel. I will try this. but why the down votes? – Janos Oct 06 '16 at 12:55
The downvotes are because you didn't search for an answer before posting this question. There are many html parsing solutions that are discussed online. – Shmuel Oct 06 '16 at 12:57
1

please check this question with the top answer.... http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454/6618769 – Janos Oct 06 '16 at 12:59

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 06 '16 at 13:05

You could parse XML or use regex. To keep things simple, I would suggest regex. Here is how you can use it:

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("<span id=\"artist\">(.*?)<\\/span><span id=\"titl\">(.*?)<\\/span>");
Matcher m = pattern.matcher(input);
if (m.find() {
    MatchResult result = m.toMatchResult();
    String artist = result.group(1);
    String title = result.group(3);
}

Where input is the XML you have.

In regex, patterns inside parenthesis represent capture groups. They allow you to extract results from a match. However, note that in the code you retrieve the group 1 and 3. That's because for every capture group you have the own capture group and the result. So, result.group(0) would be the pattern for the first group and result.group(2) would be the pattern for the second group.

Substring a string from both end in java

2 Answers2