How to make regex alternation return first match?

Question

Hi,
I have the following string:
"i am a man and i have a cat and a dog and a bird"
and I wish to extract the part of the sentence from "man" up to the first occurence of "dog" or "cat". So I wish the extracted sentence to be
"and i have a"
or alternatively
"man and i have a cat"
I would guess the regular expression "man.*(cat|dog)" should do it, but that seems to always return the sentence up to the last occurrence of dog and cat, when I want the first occurrence. So "man.*(cat|dog)" returns (when using find() and group()):
"man and i have a cat and a dog"
Anyone have any ideas how I can return the sentence from (preferably excluding) man and to (preferably excluding) the first occurrence of cat or dog?
Thanks!
Message was edited by:
MagnusGJ
Message was edited by:
MagnusGJ

Answer 1

Take your pick -
        // One  possibility
        String target = "i am a man and i have a cat and a dog and a bird";
        String result = target.replaceFirst(".*?man (.*?)( cat| dog).*", "$1");
        System.out.println(result);
        // and another
        Matcher m = Pattern.compile("man (.*?) (cat|dog)").matcher(target);
        if (m.find())
            System.out.println(m.group(1));
        }