Need advice on negating a whole string line with regular expression

Question

Hi All,
I am not able to ignore / get rid of the following line even though my Java 6 (Windows XP) String Pattern matching has not taken cater for it:
*% Cleared: 61%*
Below is the existing Java String Pattern matching in the simple program:
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("(^.*[A-Z][a-z]*){1,2} \\d{0,4}/?\\d{0,4} ([A-Z][a-z]*){1,2} St|Rd|Av|Sq|Cl|Pl|Cr|Gr|Dr|Hwy|Pde|Wy|La \\d br [h|u|t] \\$\\d+,\\d+|\\$\\d*\\,\\d+,\\d+ ([A-Z][a-z]*){1,}.*$");This pattern is working for valid strings.
The following pattern has included "^(?!.*\.\.).*$" into the existing one but had no luck still:
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("^(?!.*\.\.).*$|((^.*[A-Z][a-z]*){1,2} \\d{0,4}/?\\d{0,4} ([A-Z][a-z]*){1,2} St|Rd|Av|Sq|Cl|Pl|Cr|Gr|Dr|Hwy|Pde|Wy|La \\d br [h|u|t] \\$\\d+,\\d+|\\$\\d*\\,\\d+,\\d+ ([A-Z][a-z]*){1,}.*$)");This picked up other rubbish including "*% Cleared: 61%*".
I am looking for a single regular expression that applies to the whole line.
I am quite new to regular expression but has read through Regular Expressions Cookbook (Oreilly - 2009) and is still not familiar with advance functions such as lookahead / lookbehind...
Your assistance would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Jack

Answer 1

Hi Winston,
I am still digesting the material from the regular expression book and will take sometime to become proficient with it.
It seems that using groupCount() to eliminate the unwanted text does not work in this case, since all the lines returned the same value. Ie 3 posted earlier. This may be because the patterns are complex and only a few were grouped together. Otherwise, could you provide an example using the string posted as opposed to a hyperthetic one. In the meantime, at least one solution have been found by defining an additional special pattern “\\A[^%].*\\Z”, before combining / intersecting both existing and the new special pattern to get the best of both world. Another approach that should also work is to evaluate the size of String.split() and only accept those lines with a minimum number of tokens.
Anyhow, I have come a crossed another minor stumbling block in the mean time with the following line, where some hidden characters is preventing the existing pattern from reading it:
o;?Mervan Bay 40 Boyde St 7 br t $250,000 X West Park AE
Below is the existing regular expression that works for other lines with the same pattern but not for special hidden characters such as “o;?”:
\\A([A-Z][a-z]*){1,2} [0-9]{0,4}/?[0-9]{0,4}-?[0-9]{0,4} ([A-Z][a-z]*){1,2} St|Rd|Av|Sq|Cl|Pl|Cr|Gr|Dr|Hwy|Pde|Wy|La [0-9] br [h|u|t] \\$\\d+,\\d+|\\$\\d*\\,\\d+,\\d+ ([A-Z][a-z]*){1,}\\ZIs it possible to come up with a regular expression to ignore them so that this line could be picked up? Would also like to know whether I could combine both the special pattern “\\A[^%].*\\Z” with existing one as opposed to using 2 separate patterns altogether?
Many thanks,
Jack