Regular Expressions in Fortress
Our first program demonstrates the use of regular expressions in Java. Here’s the full source code:
import java.util.regex.*;
import java.util.Arrays;
public class RegularExpressions {
public static void main(String[] args) {
// This tests whether a pattern matches a string.
boolean match = Pattern.matches("p([a-z]+)ch", "peach");
System.out.println(match);
// For other regex tasks, we need to compile a Pattern object.
Pattern r = Pattern.compile("p([a-z]+)ch");
// Many methods are available on these objects. Here's a match test like we saw earlier.
Matcher m = r.matcher("peach");
System.out.println(m.matches());
// This finds the match for the regex.
m = r.matcher("peach punch");
m.find();
System.out.println(m.group());
// This also finds the first match but returns the start and end indexes for the match.
m = r.matcher("peach punch");
m.find();
System.out.println("idx: [" + m.start() + " " + m.end() + "]");
// The group methods include information about both the whole-pattern matches
// and the submatches within those matches.
m = r.matcher("peach punch");
m.find();
System.out.println(Arrays.asList(m.group(), m.group(1)));
// Similarly, this will return information about the indexes of matches and submatches.
m = r.matcher("peach punch");
m.find();
System.out.println(Arrays.asList(m.start(), m.end(), m.start(1), m.end(1)));
// To find all matches for a regex, we can use a while loop with find().
m = r.matcher("peach punch pinch");
while (m.find()) {
System.out.print(m.group() + " ");
}
System.out.println();
// The replaceAll method can be used to replace subsets of strings with other values.
String result = r.matcher("a peach").replaceAll("<fruit>");
System.out.println(result);
// The replaceAll method with a lambda allows you to transform matched text with a given function.
result = r.matcher("a peach").replaceAll(matchResult -> matchResult.group().toUpperCase());
System.out.println(result);
}
}
To run the program, compile the code into a .class
file and then use java
to execute it.
$ javac RegularExpressions.java
$ java RegularExpressions
true
true
peach
idx: [0 5]
[peach, ea]
[0, 5, 1, 3]
peach punch pinch
a <fruit>
a PEACH
This example demonstrates various operations with regular expressions in Java:
- Simple pattern matching
- Compiling patterns
- Finding matches
- Extracting submatches
- Finding all matches
- Replacing matched text
Note that Java’s regex API is somewhat different from Go’s. Instead of having many methods on a single object, Java splits functionality between Pattern
and Matcher
classes. The Pattern
class represents a compiled regular expression, while the Matcher
class is used to perform match operations on a character sequence by interpreting a Pattern
.
For a complete reference on Java regular expressions, check the java.util.regex
package documentation.