Find the last match with Java regex matcher

Question

I\'m trying to get the last result of a match without having to cycle through .find()

Here\'s my code:

String in = \"num 123 num 1 num 698 num 19238          


        

Answer 1

Regular expressions are greedy:

Matcher m=Pattern.compile(".*num '([0-9]+) ",Pattern.DOTALL).matcher("num 123 num 1 num 698 num 19238 num 2134");

will give you a Matcher for the last match, and you can apply it to most regexes by prepending ".*". Of course, if you can't use DOTALL, you might want to use (?:\d|\D) or something similar as your wildcard.