Find first occurence of an integer in a string

Question

Hi all,
I have a number of strings which go something like "MBNA Flow 12a" and I want to separate the integer from the rest of the string so I can parse it, sort the strings into some sort of order according to their integer, and then put it all back together again. The problem I'm having is finding the position of the integer within the string, so that I can take a substring and/or split the string. I've looked it up and I gather that using regex I should be able to find the beginning and end of the integer, using something along the lines of           
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\d+");
           Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(temp.getString(1));which I found on another site where someone had the same problem. I've looked at the regex tutorials and according to them this is what I want, but whenever I try it no match is found, and I don't know why. Some sites have claimed that the regular expression has to apply to the entire string, so I would need to also take into account the MBNA Flow etc, something I'm loathe to do as the string is quite unpredictable, but others say that it should work exactly as is.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. :)
Thanks.

Answer 1

silversurfer20 wrote:
Its throwing the exception cause its not finding a match in the string I know there should be a match in. What I'm wondering is why .Call find() before using either group() or start():
import java.util.regex.*;
public class Main {
    public static void main(String[]args) {
        Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\d+");
        Matcher m = p.matcher("foo 12 bar 34 baz");
        if(m.find()) {
            System.out.println("first number: "+m.group()+", starts at index: "+m.start());
        } else {
            System.out.println("nothing found");
}Output:
first number: 12, starts at index: 4