Regular expression for 2nd occurance of a substring in a string

Question

Hi,
1)
i want to find the second occurrence of a substring in a string with regular expression so that i can modify that only.
Ex: i have a string like ---> axe,afn,sdk,jdi,afn,mki,mki
in this i want the second occurance of afn and change that one only...
which regular expression i have to use...
Note that ...i have to use regular expression only....no string manipulation methods...(strictly)
2)
How can i apply the multiple regular expressions multiple times on a single string ..i.e in the above instance i have to apply the same 2nd occurrence logic for
substring mki also. for this i have to use a single regular expression string that contains validations for both the sub strings mki and afn.
Thanks in advance,
Venkat

Answer 1

javafreak666 wrote:
Hi,
1)
i want to find the second occurrence of a substring in a string with regular expression so that i can modify that only.
Ex: i have a string like ---> axe,afn,sdk,jdi,afn,mki,mki
in this i want the second occurance of afn and change that one only...
which regular expression i have to use...
Note that ...i have to use regular expression only....no string manipulation methods...(strictly)
2)
How can i apply the multiple regular expressions multiple times on a single string ..i.e in the above instance i have to apply the same 2nd occurrence logic for
substring mki also. for this i have to use a single regular expression string that contains validations for both the sub strings mki and afn.
Thanks in advance,
VenkatWhat do you mean by using a regex to get the index of a second substring? There is not method in Java which uses regex to et the index of a substring.
There are various indexOf(...) methods for this:
String text = "axe,afn,sdk,jdi,afn,mki,mki";
String target = "afn";
int second = text.indexOf(target, text.indexOf(target)+1);
System.out.println("second="+second);Of course you can find the index of a group like this:
Matcher m = Pattern.compile(target+".*?("+target+")").matcher(text);
System.out.println(m.find() ? "index="+m.start(1) : "nothing found");but there is not single method that handles this: you'll have to call the find() and then the start(...) method on the Matcher instance, so the indexOf(...) approach is the favourable one, IMO.