Extract all occurences of a substring from a string

Question

hello guys how would i extract all instances of a substring pattern given a string. e.g given a string templateContent = 'hello adrian , this is for {!Contact.Name} to be delivered to {!Account.ShippingAddress}';. how would i extract all instances of the substrings that have this pattern {!FirstWord.SecondWord}. please note that i am also allowing for punctuation blunders from the users that enter that string. for example a user can type in {!Contact.FirstName}{!Order.Date} (in this case the error being that there is no space between the words. using split would'nt be so effective for this use case from my experience) .

ive been trying to wrap my head around this but i am yet to . Please help . Thank you all.

Answer 1

This is a simple "regular expression" situation. You can use the following code as a starting point:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile('\\{!.+?\\}');
string templateContent = 'hello adrian , this is for {!Contact.Name} to be delivered to {!Account.ShippingAddress}';
Matcher m = p.matcher(templateContent);
while(m.find()) {
    System.debug(m.group(0));
}

Where \\{!.+?\\} means:

• Find {!
• Followed by any character (.) at least once (+), the minimum number of times possible (?) to the next part.
• Find }

This will work even when the {!...} is immediately followed by another one.