Regex: Extracting content from multiline texts.

[Tibi Kiss]

Extracting content from multiline texts.

I have a kind of licence file and somewhere near the end of file I would like to create a section like

 
      ---- BEGIN SIGNATURE ---- 
9WoU3LSC/9FEMRv5ZZy+/ACk54poDlnjg4r/7oC/8jhN//XB2TXSxlQXXFn9lgSANLUeLEPFKCjS
nmtfCeUzVFQKPrApPADZKaS2v9LhC4wyXjKElHg/Tf5iUvwuAkf/wG/ulBXUmcluLEXC9+VPuL0i
F2Bu40xHmnRSWheaQtmFH6MP3Woev4u3q9otucVcuX0m1R2iubN2ClznnqAjOO0llhQD4vJKDkjs
pRQqHEbFmzY/HDIeeDbWGHDJdDdXD9Vw81LKpXBj6wjxsymsdAMU1uJ6eyxpIhWzDy3mOIKgkrG
C5/8/b01PVxRj9ivILmxBVMPeew=

      ---- END SIGNATURE ----   
 

In Java if I use the following pattern matching

    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(?s)----\\sBEGIN\\sSIGNATURE\\s----(.*?)----\\sEND\\sSIGNATURE\\s----", Pattern.MULTILINE);
    Matcher m = p.matcher(licence);
    while (m.find())
            System.out.println("Found: "+ m.group());

I get the signature but without being removed the marker lines.
How should I modify the regular expression to get rid of the marker lines and to have only the content in between these marker lines?

[Rob Spoor]

Use a positive lookbehind and positive lookahead for the start and end respectively. See java.util.regex.Pattern's Javadoc for more information.

[Ireneusz Kordal]

Do not modify the pattern, but retrieve group number 1 in this code fragment:

    while (m.find())
            System.out.println("Found: "+ m.group( 1 ));

[Tibi Kiss]

Many thank!