Extract all substrings beginning and ending with a regex from large string

Question

I have a large string which contains multiline-substrings between two constant marker-strings, which I can identify with a regex.

For simplification I named them abcdef and fedcba here:

abcdef Sed lobortis nisl sed malesuada bibendum. fedcba
...

abcdef Fusce odio turpis, accumsan non posuere placerat. 
1
2
3
fedcba

abcdef Aliquam erat volutpat. Proin ultrices fedcba

How can I get all the occurrences including the markers from the large string?

Answer 1

Something like

Pattern r = Pattern.compile("abcdef[\\s\\S]*?fedcba");
Matcher m = r.matcher(sInput);
if (m.find( )) {
    System.out.println("Found value: " + m.group() );
}

where sInput is your string to search.

[\s\S]*? will match any number of any character up to the following fedcba. Thanks to the ? it's a non-greedy match, which means it won't continue until the last fedcba (as it would if it was greedy), thus giving you the separate strings.