Java - split a string to different fields using regex

Question

Does anyone have an idea how I can split a string returned by a WS to different strings?

String wsResult = "SONACOM RC, RUE DES ETOILES N. 20, 75250 PARIS (MI)";

I'm trying to split it into:

String name = "SONACOM RC";
String adress = "RUE DES ETOILES N. 20";
String postalCode = "75250";
String city = "PARIS";

N.B: the return of the WS changes only what is inside of my parameters

Thank you in advance for your help

You need a constant structure in order to use regexes or `.split`. It's not clear from your question if this condition does apply — GalAbra, Jan 15 '18 at 15:44
Are you sure that there won't be any comma in the address part itself ? If it is the case you can use a regex to find the group. Something like this might work in your case: (.*),(.*), *(\d{5})(.*) You can check the behavior of regexp online, here for instance: https://www.regexplanet.com/advanced/java/index.html — Guillaume, Jan 15 '18 at 15:47
Depends how you want to parse that information... `(?[\w .-]+?)\s*,\s*(?
[\w .-]+?)\s*,\s*(?\d+)\s*(?[^()]+?)(?:\s+.*)?$` or `\s*,\s*|(?<=\b\d{5})\s+` — ctwheels, Jan 15 '18 at 15:48
@Guillaume the regex I posted will work in Java, Python, PCRE, among others. — ctwheels, Jan 15 '18 at 15:51
I was totally unaware of named group in Java since jdk7! Thanks :) — Guillaume, Jan 15 '18 at 16:23
I propose you the following regex `([^,]+),([^,]+),\s*(\d+)\s+([^(]+)(?= +\()`. — Andrei Odegov, Jan 15 '18 at 18:04
Split on comma (if comma's aren't relative) then examine what's left after split. And, who knows the variants of whatever this string represents .. — , Jan 15 '18 at 21:07

The fourth bird · Accepted Answer · 2018-01-15T19:48:28.197

You could capture your data in 4 capturing groups. Your provided example uses uppercase characters, which you can match with [A-Z]. If you want to match also lowercase characters, digits and an underscore, you could replace [A-Z] or [A-Z\d] with \w. You can go about this in multiple ways. An approach could be:

([A-Z ]+), +([A-Z\d .]+), +(\d+) +([A-Z\d() ]+)

Explanation

Group 1: match one or more uppercase characters or a whitespace ([A-Z ]+)
Match a comma and one or more whitespaces , +
Group 2: match one or more uppercase characters or digit or whitespace or dot ([A-Z\d .]+)
Match a comma and one or more whitespaces , +
Group 3: match one or more digits (\d+)
Match one or more whitespaces +
Group 4: match one or more uppercase characters or digit or open/close parenthesis or whitespace ([A-Z\d() ]+)

Output in Java

Alex Cuadrón · Answer 2 · 2018-01-15T18:29:06.387

One easy way to split it as you'd like is using wsResult.split(","). However, you'll have to add a comma between 75250 and Paris:

String wsResult = "SONACOM RC, RUE DES ETOILES N. 20, 75250, PARIS (MI)";
String[] temp = wsResult.split(",");
String name = temp[0];
String adress = temp[1];
String postalCode = temp[2];
String city = temp[3];

Using that you will get the output you're looking for.

EDIT

Another way to get your output without adding a comma would be to do this (using the code above too):

for(int i = 1; i<postalCode.length(); i++){

    if(postalCode.charAt(i) == ' ') {
        city = postalCode.substring(i,postalCode.length());
        postalCode = postalCode.substring(0,i);
        break;
    }

}

For more information check the String class in the API Java and this Stack Overflow question.

Java - split a string to different fields using regex

2 Answers2