Regular Expression Question in Java

Question

Sample input: Did xxx xxx xxx (could be any number of words) live or die?

For example:

 Did   Michael      Jackson  live or     die     ?

I want to capture: Michael Jackson, live, die. The sentence can have any number of spaces between words.

How do I do it?

Answer 1

Did\\s+(.+)\\s+(\\S+)\\s+or\\s+(\\S+)\\s*\\?

or am I missing something?

EDIT: changed single backslashes to double backslashes

Answer 2

Something like this would work. You will need to take the first group, Michael Jackson, and split it by the space character.

Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^Did (.+)\s+(\w+)\s+or\s+(\w+)$", 
                                  Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE | 
                                  Pattern.UNICODE_CASE);
Matcher regexMatcher = regex.matcher(subjectString);
if (regexMatcher.find()) 
{
  String []person = regexMatcher.group(0).split(" ");
  String action1 = regexMatcher.group(1);
  String action2 = regexMatcher.group(2);
}