Regex to pick a text between <>

Question

I’m trying to pick a word between <>. For example:

Text: "Joao <[email protected]>"

My regex should take [email protected], but it’s catching <[email protected]> The regex I’m using is <(.*?)>.

Does anyone know how to remove the <>?

Answer 1

Alternative solution (without Regex)

As the author mentioned being using Java, there is an alternative answer with substring, for those who might be interested:

mail = mail.substring(mail.indexOf("<")+1,mail.indexOf(">"));

See working on IDEONE.

Answer 2

You can use an expression that reads all characters other than the >:

\<([^\>]+)\>

A Jsfiddle showing an example with this regex: http://jsfiddle.net/r1mfz24s/. Note that you don’t need to escape the < and the >, but I usually escape all the special characters to avoid confusion.

Answer 3

It worked for me using regular expression <(.*)>.

Using the website http://regex101.com - when testing this regular expression with Joao <[email protected]>, what was captured was only the [email protected].

Answer 4

Does anyone know how to remove the <>?

Yes, you have to escape them.

Java...

public static void main(String[] args) {

    String texto = "Joao <[email protected]>";
    String regex = "\\<(?<meuGrupo>.*?)\\>";
    String retorno = "";

    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex,Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);;
    Matcher comparator = pattern.matcher(texto);
    if (comparator.find(0)){
        retorno = comparator.group("meuGrupo");
    }

    System.out.println(retorno);
}