I don't understand why matcher.find() always return false

Question

My String page contain this page http://www.posh24.se/kandisar and I want to extract everything between

<div class="channelListEntry">

and

</div>

and put the result into an ArrayList.

The things is the matcher.find() always returns false.

private ArrayList<String> extracted = new ArrayList<String>();

    public void extractChannel(String htmlPage){

    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("<div class=\"channelListEntry\">(.*?)</div>");
    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(htmlPage);

    while(matcher.find()){ // Always return false
        System.out.println("hello ?");
        extracted.add(matcher.group(1));
    }
}

I expect to copy the text between tags in my array.

Use an XML parser instead of regex matching. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags — Adam McClenaghan, May 01 '19 at 00:57

Z. Kosanovic · Accepted Answer · 2019-05-02T23:01:28.907

0

Add Pattern.DOTALL flag when compiling the pattern so it matches multilines - https://stackoverflow.com/a/2913756/9335036

edited May 02 '19 at 23:01

answered May 01 '19 at 01:00

Z. Kosanovic

727
4
10

Also, [Regex101](https://regex101.com/r/DTeDtz/1) is an awesome resource to help build more complex regexes. – NPras May 01 '19 at 04:09
Thank you, the Pattern.DOTALL do the thing and it works but when i try to escape the dash charater, android studio say "Illegal escape character in string literal". – faradiel May 01 '19 at 08:46
No i mean i cant compile if i try to escape the dash character. – faradiel May 01 '19 at 18:50
Yeah, my question was does it compile if you don't escape it. – Z. Kosanovic May 01 '19 at 19:31
if i dont escape it i can compile ! – faradiel May 02 '19 at 21:31
Oh, cool. I edited the answer since that step is not needed. Glad it works. – Z. Kosanovic May 02 '19 at 23:02

I don't understand why matcher.find() always return false

1 Answers1