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Extract german zipcode from line in Java

Answer 1

+3 A:

\b\d{5}\b

will match 5 digits if they are "on their own", i.e. surrounded by word boundaries (to ensure we're not matching substrings of a longer sequence of numbers, although those will probably be rare in an address file).

Remember that you'll need to escape the backslashes in a Java string ("\\b\\d{5}\\b").

Tim Pietzcker 2010-05-31 09:50:33

thanks! but they are not always "alone". sometimes I have "DE-12345"

tzippy 2010-05-31 09:53:51

Yes, and this works since the position between the `-` and the number counts as a word boundary. It just won't match a number like `123456` because it contains more than five digits.

Tim Pietzcker 2010-05-31 09:55:20

Ah okay, didn't get the maning of word boundaries. Thanks!Another question concerning Java:matcher.matches() gives me a boolean but how do I return the zipcode itsself?

tzippy 2010-05-31 09:59:10

I think you shouldn't rely on the word boundary if the data is entered by users - maybe someone enters D12345. Five digits won't appear anywhere else, so it's a good bet that it's the zip code anyway. That is, unless there are house numbers with five digits, of course, but I'm not aware of any :)

OregonGhost 2010-05-31 10:00:35

we don't have five digit house numbers in germany =)

tzippy 2010-05-31 10:03:44

@tzippy: `matcher.group()` should give you the match result. And of course you can drop the `\b` if you don't need them.

Tim Pietzcker 2010-05-31 10:43:09

Yeah, thanks, just found that one out myself.But there#s a big flaw. A leading zero is recognized as word boundary and then cut off!But leading zeros are part of the zipcode!

tzippy 2010-05-31 10:58:04

Oh Sorry, my mistake. Shouldn't convert to int if I want to keep the leading zero =)

tzippy 2010-05-31 11:43:11

@tzippy For your last mistake, see also http://thedailywtf.com/Comments/Jan48.aspx#188154 "Thank you for invalidating my input before validating it." ;-)

Christian Semrau 2010-05-31 20:23:26

Answer 2

+1 A:

Pattern.matcher("[0-9]{5}")

Daniel 2010-05-31 09:50:45

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Extract german zipcode from line in Java

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