How to parse the hours and mins string?

[divs saran]

Hi,
How to parse string with hours and mins to mins? sample input strings are- 10 hours 30 mins, 1 hour, 2 hours, 45mins, 1 min. I have to convert the time to mins.
Any help is appreciated.

[Balu Sadhasivam]

divs,
first work out the format of the input String and use String's split() , subString() functions to get the numbers in them..

[Campbell Ritchie]

Look for classes like SimpleDateFormat.

[Rob Spoor]

That doesn't support using words like "hours" and "minutes".

I think regular expressions can help you out. You want the following:
1) a number, any number of spaces, the word "hours" - the number is the number of hours
2) a number, any number of spaces, the word "minutes" - the number is the number of minutes
3) a combination of the above two

One regular expression with two parts, each optional and each with a capturing group, could help you out quite easily - once you've set up the regex that is. Check out java.util.regex.Pattern and its full Javadoc page.

[Campbell Ritchie]

You can probably set up a group like hours|h|hr|hour|hrs to capture "hours" and similarly for minutes.

[Rob Spoor]

And of course make it case insensitive.

<nitpicking>
hours|h|hr|hour|hrs is not optimal. You can optimize this by splitting of common parts (added parentheses and spaces to make it clearer):

h(
    (r(s?))
    |
    (our(s?))
)?

That said, I would use your regex too. It may be suboptimal, but it's so much easier to understand.
</nitpicking>