regular expression to extract JSON string from text
expression, json, regex
Solution
The following regex should work:
\{\s*"mTitle"\s*:\s*(.+?)\s*,\s*"mPoster":\s*(.+?)\s*,\s*"mYear"\s*:\s*(.+?)\s*,\s*"mDate"\s*:\s*(.+?)\s*\}
Check demo here.
The main difference from your regex is the `.+?` part, that, broken down, means:
- Match any character (`.`)
- One or more times (`+`)
- As little as possible (`?`)
The `?` operator after the `+` is very important here --- because if you removed it, the first `.+` (in `\{\s*"mTitle"\s*:\s*(.+?)`) would match the whole text, not the text up to the `"mPoster"` word, that is what you want.
Notice it is just a more complicated version of `\{"mTitle":(.+?),"mPoster":(.+?),"mYear":(.+?),"mDate":(.+?)\}` (with `\s*` to match spaces, allowed by the JSON notation).
Problem
I'm looking for regex to extract json string from text. I have the text below, which contains ``` JSON string(mTitle, mPoster, mYear, mDate) ``` like that: ``` {"999999999":"138138138","020202020202":{"846":{"mTitle":"\u0430","mPoster":{" small":"\/upload\/ms\/b_248.jpg","middle":"600.jpg","big":"400.jpg"},"mYear" :"2013","mDate":"2014-01-01"},"847":{"mTitle":"\u043a","mPoster":"small":"\/upload\/ms\/241.jpg","middle":"600.jpg","big":" 138.jpg"},"mYear":"2013","mDate":"2013-12-26"},"848":{"mTitle":"\u041f","mPoster":{"small":"\/upload\/movies\/2 40.jpg","middle":"138.jpg","big":"131.jpg"},"mYear":"2013","mDate":"2013-12-19"}}} ``` In order to parse JSON string I should extract JSON string from the text. That is why, my question: Could you help me to get only JSON string from text? Please help. I've tried this regular expression with no success: ``` {"mTitle":(\w|\W)*"mDate":(\w|\W)*} ```