How to extract a substring using regex

Question

I have a string that has two single quotes in it, the ' character. In between the single quotes is the data I want.

How can I write a regex to extract "the data i want" from the following text?

mydata = "some string with 'the data i want' inside"; 

Answer 1

Assuming you want the part between single quotes, use this regular expression with a Matcher:

"'(.*?)'" 

Example:

String mydata = "some string with 'the data i want' inside"; Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("'(.*?)'"); Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(mydata); if (matcher.find()) {     System.out.println(matcher.group(1)); } 

Result:

 the data i want 

Answer 2

You don't need regex for this.

Add apache commons lang to your project (http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/), then use:

String dataYouWant = StringUtils.substringBetween(mydata, "'");