regular expression

[Vijay Chandran]

  
String record="3^DH^1^1^ABCD^3^4000.00^4000.00^^";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\^");
String[] splitRec = p.split(record);
for(String s: splitRec)
{
        if(!s.equals("^"))
        {
             count++;
        }
}
System.out.println(count);

Dear friends,
When i execute the above code the caret count is 8.
Its not taking two continuous carets into count.
How to make the program to count continuous carets also?

Kindly provide your help.
Regards,
Vijay

[Jaime M. Tovar]

You only get 8 Strings because there is no String to get between �^^�. If you only want to count the number of �^� in the String you will need to take another approach.

Which is the specific task you have to accomplish with your program� maybe by knowing somewhat more it will be easier to understand your problem.

[Vijay Chandran]

Thank you very much for your reply Jaime!!

My problem is, i want to count the number of carets in a String and based on the number of carets i have to validate some functionality.

The caret count is fixed and it should/must be equal to 9.
So i want the caret to be counted even if they are present continuously.

This is my problem.
Hope this is clear to you Jaime.

Thanks & Regards,
Vijay

[Alan Moore]

Originally posted by Jaime Tovar:
You only get 8 Strings because there is no String to get between “^^”.

The problem is not that they're contiguous, it's that they're at the end of the string; split() ignores trailing empty fields by default. To override that behavior, use the two-argument form of split with -1 as second argument:

String[] splitRec = p.split(record, -1);

That will give you an array of length 10 in which the last two elements are empty strings. Be aware that 10, not 9, is the number you'll get by iterating over the array, which is unnecssary anyway. If you really want to know how many separators there are, all you have to do is subtract 1 from the array's length:

int fieldCount = splitRec.length;
int caretCount = fieldCount - 1;