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 "the data i want" from the following text?

mydata = "some string with 'the data i want' inside";

Answer 1

Assuming you want the part between single quotes, use this regular expression with a Matcher:

"'(.*?)'"

Example:

String mydata = "some string with 'the data i want' inside";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("'(.*?)'");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(mydata);
if (matcher.find())
{
    System.out.println(matcher.group(1));
}

Result:

the data i want