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Java REGEX Operator precedence

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By User



I have a few strings:







john doe happy

george smith is happy







Here's my Regular Expression:







([a-zA-Z ]+) (is happy|happy)







I need group 1 to always be a name like "john doe" or "george smith"





I need group 2 to always be either "happy" or "is happy"





Right now, "george smith is happy" always matches up to "george smith is" and "happy" ... when I really want it to be "george smith" and "is happy"





How do I make "is happy" have precedence over "happy"?


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Comments

  1. Tips For AllFebruary 20, 2012 at 7:58 AM

    The + is greedy, meaning that it will match as many characters as possible, so you will never match is happy with your regex as it is written. You can change this to a lazy match by changing it to +?, which matches as few characters as possible (still one or more):

    ([a-zA-Z ]+?) (is happy|happy)

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