How to extract a string between two delimiters [duplicate]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
substring between two delimiters

I have a string like

"ABC[ This is to extract ]"

I want to extract the part "This is to extract" in java. I am trying to use split, but it is not working the way I want. Does anyone have suggestion?

Answer 1

If you have just a pair of brackets ( [] ) in your string, you can use indexOf():

String str = "ABC[ This is the text to be extracted ]";     String result = str.substring(str.indexOf("[") + 1, str.indexOf("]")); 

Answer 2

If there is only 1 occurrence, the answer of ivanovic is the best way I guess. But if there are many occurrences, you should use regexp:

\[(.*?)\] this is your pattern. And in each group(1) will get you your string.

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\[(.*?)\\]"); Matcher m = p.matcher(input); while(m.find()) {     m.group(1); //is your string. do what you want }