Getting the text that follows after the regex match

I'm new to using Regex, I've been going through a rake of tutorials but I haven't found one that applies to what I want to do,

I want to search for something, but return everything following it but not the search string itself

e.g. "Some lame sentence that is awesome"

search for "sentence"

return "that is awesome"

Any help would be much appreciated

This is my regex so far

sentence(.*) 

but it returns: sentence that is awesome

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("sentence(.*)");

Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher("some lame sentence that is awesome");

boolean found = false;
while (matcher.find())
{
    System.out.println("I found the text: " + matcher.group().toString());
    found = true;
}
if (!found)
{
    System.out.println("I didn't find the text");
}

Solution 1:

You can do this with "just the regular expression" as you asked for in a comment:

(?<=sentence).*

(?<=sentence) is a positive lookbehind assertion. This matches at a certain position in the string, namely at a position right after the text sentence without making that text itself part of the match. Consequently, (?<=sentence).* will match any text after sentence.

This is quite a nice feature of regex. However, in Java this will only work for finite-length subexpressions, i. e. (?<=sentence|word|(foo){1,4}) is legal, but (?<=sentence\s*) isn't.

Solution 2:

Your regex "sentence(.*)" is right. To retrieve the contents of the group in parenthesis, you would call:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile( "sentence(.*)" );
Matcher m = p.matcher( "some lame sentence that is awesome" );
if ( m.find() ) {
   String s = m.group(1); // " that is awesome"
}

Note the use of m.find() in this case (attempts to find anywhere on the string) and not m.matches() (would fail because of the prefix "some lame"; in this case the regex would need to be ".*sentence(.*)")

Solution 3:

if Matcher is initialized with str, after the match, you can get the part after the match with

str.substring(matcher.end())

Sample Code:

final String str = "Some lame sentence that is awesome";
final Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("sentence").matcher(str);
if(matcher.find()){
    System.out.println(str.substring(matcher.end()).trim());
}

Output:

that is awesome

Solution 4:

You need to use the group(int) of your matcher - group(0) is the entire match, and group(1) is the first group you marked. In the example you specify, group(1) is what comes after "sentence".