Never start off with your regular expression with greedy quantifiers unless you know what you are doing. The
.* at the start of your expression gobbles up your entire line. Then it realizes that there are other patterns/characters to be matched i.e. the
\\]\\s+(.+) and so the regex engine starts backtracking which is expensive.
> has anyone been able to figure out why my original regex is not
> matching?
Your regex is exhausted just before the "Threat" word i.e. your entire regex matches till the character 'T' of 'Threat'. Your use of
$ at the end kills off the entire match and hence the engine doesn't report a match.
Also, your use of non-capturing parentheses
(?:) confuses me; why use them? I've removed the non-capturing parentheses and added the
.* at the end to get something like:
public class ScrapRegexTests {
public static void main(final String[] args) {
String hitInput = "[CHAT WINDOW TEXT] [Sun Nov 29 11:34:13] Guardian of Water attacks Kyton's Rebuke [BH] : *hit* : (20 + 108 = 128 : Threat Roll: 3 + 108 = 111)";
String hitRegex = "^.*\\]\\s+(.+)\\s+attacks\\s+(.+)\\s+:\\s\\*([a-z][a-z]+)\\*\\s+:\\s.*\\+\\s(\\d+)\\s.+\\s+:\\s(.*)";
Pattern pat = Pattern.compile(hitRegex);
Matcher matcher = pat.matcher(hitInput);
if(matcher.matches()) {
System.out.println("Regex matched : #" + matcher.group(1) + "#");
System.out.println("Regex matched : #" + matcher.group(2) + "#");
System.out.println("Regex matched : #" + matcher.group(3) + "#");
System.out.println("Regex matched : #" + matcher.group(4) + "#");
System.out.println("Unprocessed String : #" + matcher.group(5) + "#");
} else {
System.out.println("No match found!");
}
}
}
Regex matched : #Guardian of Water#
Regex matched : #Kyton's Rebuke [BH]#
Regex matched : #hit#
Regex matched : #108#
Unprocessed String : #Threat Roll: 3 + 108 = 111)#
I'm sure you can carry on from here. I *think* there are better ways of writing the same thing but I'd defer my solution till you post your working solution.
HTH.
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