[geran]

I need to capture strings like:

P(Risk) = 0.90
P(Disease | Risk) = .02
P(Disease | !Risk) = 0.005
Q(Disease | Symptom)
Q(Symptom | Risk)

and so on and '#' is a comment, e.g I dont want to capture

# P(Disease | Symptom)=0.1

How can I do this with regular expressions?

I do it like this know

Code:
	String B = "(P.*\\((.*?)\\).*=(.*))";
	Pattern p = Pattern.compile(B);
        Matcher m = p.matcher(expresion);
        /*find P(exp) == v*/
        while(m.find()){
        	System.out.println(m.group(0));
        }
        /*find Q(...)*/
        String C = "Q.*\\((.*?)\\)";
        p = Pattern.compile(C);
        m = p.matcher(expresion);
        while(m.find()){
        	System.out.println(m.group(0));
        }

but that would capture #P(..) and #Q(..) expressions to, How can I ignore the comments?

I tried to add [^#] in front of the expression (B and C)but that didn't work, shouldnt ^ inside a character class negate the mathing, e.g dont match '#'?

[ameat]

try to add ^\s*[^#] to the front of the pattern... looking for potential white-space at the front of a line and no initial #... maybe, haven't tried...

[geran]

didnt work,

"^.*[^#](P.*\\((.*?)\\).*=(.*))"
only matches the commented lines. [^#] dont seem to negate the mathing of '#'

correct me if I got it wrong, but shouldnt "^.*[^#]" mean all lines biggining whit any whitespace character (zero or more) but NOT contain `#'?

[larkost]

Originally posted by geran:
correct me if I got it wrong, but shouldnt "^.*[^#]" mean all lines biggining whit any whitespace character (zero or more) but NOT contain `#'?

No, that pattern would be any line stating with 0 or more of any character and then having a character other than '#'... not a very meaningful match.

I don't ever do regexp's in Java, preferring to do them in Perl (where the gods meant regexp to be done... *chuckle*), but the pattern there would be something like:

/^\s*[PQ]\(/

Of course, I don't know exactly what the file you are filtering looks like, so there are a lot of variants on this patten that would filter out data you don't want, or simplify things to parse out the data you do want.

[Kristoff]

you could always use what you have, then check for comments.