How to extract a substring using regex

Question

I have a string that has two single quotes in it, the \' character. In between the single quotes is the data I want.

How can I write a regex to extract

Answer 1

There's a simple one-liner for this:

String target = myData.replaceAll("[^']*(?:'(.*?)')?.*", "$1");

By making the matching group optional, this also caters for quotes not being found by returning a blank in that case.

See live demo.