Java Regex: how to capture multiple matches in the same line

Question

I am trying to match a regex pattern in Java, and I have two questions:

1. Inside the pattern I'm looking for there is a known beginning and then an unknown string that I want to get up until the first occurrence of an &.
2. there are multiple occurrences of these patterns in the line and I would like to get each occurrence separately.

For example I have this input line:

1234567 100,110,116,129,139,140,144,146 http://www.gold.com/shc/s/c_10153_12605_Computers+%26+Electronics_Televisions?filter=Screen+Refresh+Rate%7C120HZ%5EScreen+Size%7C37+in.+to+42+in.&sName=View+All&viewItems=25&subCatView=true   ISx20070515x00001a          http://www.gold.com/shc/s/c_10153_12605_Computers+%26+Electronics_Televisions?filter=Screen+Refresh+Rate%7C120HZ&sName=View+All&subCatView=true 0   2819357575609397706

And I am interested in these strings:

Screen+Refresh+Rate%7C120HZ%5EScreen+Size%7C37+in.+to+42+in.

Screen+Refresh+Rate%7C120HZ

Answer 1

Assuming the known beginning is filter=**, the regular expression pattern (?:filter=\\*\\*)(.*?)(?:&) should get you what you need. Use Matcher.find() to get all occurrences of the pattern in a given string. Using the test string you provided, the following:

final Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(?:filter=\\*\\*)(.*?)(?:&)");
final Matcher m = p.matcher(testString);
int cnt = 0;
while (m.find()) {
    System.out.println(++cnt + ": G1: " + m.group(1));
}

Will output:

1: G1: Screen+Refresh+Rate%7C120HZ%5EScreen+Size%7C37+in.+to+42+in.
2: G1: Screen+Refresh+Rate%7C120HZ**