delimiter to extract elements separated by semicolon

Question

An example of my original data format:

196 242X 3  
186 B302 3  
22  BO377 1

To extract data, I split along the delimiter (\t):

 EventDAO dao = new SimpleFileRatingDAO(inputFile, "\t");

However, my data format changed, to something like this:

"196";"242X";"3"    
"186";"B302";"3"    
"22";"BO377";"1"

Is there a regex I can use to extract the data, in a similar way to my previous method?

@Avinash Raj I actually do not expect any output. This is where I use the delimiter : EventDAO dao = new SimpleFileRatingDAO(inputFile, "\t") so it will extract elements separated by \t from the file and create objects for each element. — user3369592, Mar 17 '15 at 12:31

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:01

Your new reg Exp should be something which match both separators (if they do not apear in data)

"[\t|;]"

SimpleFileRatingDAO seems to allow regular expression: it use the object class which call String.split(str) :

enter code hereEventDAO dao = new SimpleFileRatingDAO(inputFile, "[\t|;]");

leads to:

myLine.split("[\t|;]")

If your data may contains those separators characters but only between quotation marks: you need to split on the comma only if that comma has zero, or an even number of quotes ahead of it:

"[\t|;](?=([^\"]*\"[^\"]*\")*[^\"]*$)"

Thanks to Bart Kiers who inspire me.

Thank you. Will "[\t|;]" also split the quotation marks? – user3369592 Mar 17 '15 at 12:46 — user3369592, Mar 17 '15 at 12:46

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 17 '15 at 13:10

try it with simple String-manipulations like split and replace:

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;


public class Example {

    class DataBean{

        private String info1;
        private String info2;
        private String info3;

        public DataBean(String info1, String info2, String info3){
            this.info1 = info1;
            this.info2 = info2;
            this.info3 = info3;
        }

        public String getInfo1() {return info1;}
        public void setInfo1(String info1) {this.info1 = info1;}
        public String getInfo2() {return info2;}
        public void setInfo2(String info2) {this.info2 = info2;}
        public String getInfo3() {return info3; }
        public void setInfo3(String info3) {this.info3 = info3;}

    }

    /**
     * @param args
     * @throws IOException 
     * 
     * TODO: do better exc-handling
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        /*
         * data.txt:
         * 
         *  "196";"242X";"3"    
         *  "186";"B302";"3"    
         *  "22";"BO377";"1"
         */

        File dataFile = new File("data.txt");       
        FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(dataFile);
        InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(fis);
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(isr);

        String strLine;
        List<DataBean> data = new ArrayList<DataBean>();

        while ((strLine = br.readLine()) != null)   {
          String[] rawData = strLine.replace("\"", "").split(";");
          DataBean dataBean = new Example().new DataBean(rawData[0], rawData[1], rawData[2]);
          data.add(dataBean);
        }

        for (DataBean dataBean : data) {
            System.out.println(dataBean.getInfo1() + "-" + dataBean.getInfo2() + "-" + dataBean.getInfo3());
        }
        br.close();

    }

delimiter to extract elements separated by semicolon

2 Answers2