Matching text on multiple lines which begins and ends with some characters

Question

i have a source file something like

String some_words_come_here{
    //some string lines
    //some string lines
    //some string lines
    //some string lines
};

I am using it in java

Pattern.compile("(?m)^Strin.+\\};$", Pattern.MULTILINE | Pattern.DOTALL); 

but this does not work well

with

Pattern.compile("(?m)^Strin.+", Pattern.MULTILINE); 

i get the string just until the end of the line. because .+ is quitting at the end of the line.

Answer 1

Pattern.compile("^String[^}]+\\};$", Pattern.MULTILINE);

should work unless there are } somewhere inside those lines (and unless there is whitespace before String or after };).

Explanation:

^String starts the match at the beginning of the line; match String literally.

[^}]+ matches one or more occurrences of any character except }.

\\};$ matches }; and end-of-line. The backslash escapes the }, and since the backslash itself needs to be escaped in a Java string, too, you need two of them.

Answer 2

^String .*{\r*[^.*$]*};$

this works with Kodos tool.

a test in Java:

package mytest;

import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

    public class Test4 {

     /**
      * @param args
      */
     public static void main(String[] args) {

      StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
      sb.append("String some_words_come_here{").append("\n")
       .append("    //some string lines\n")
       .append("    //some string lines\n")
       .append("    //some string lines\n")
       .append("};\n");
      String regex = "^String .*\\{\\r*[^.*$]*\\};$";
      Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex);
      Matcher m = p.matcher(sb.toString());
      System.out.println(m.find());
      System.out.println(m.group(0));

     }

    }

output:

true
String some_words_come_here{
    //some string lines
    //some string lines
    //some string lines
};