Regular expressions are very important tool for seraching in text. Below is the code snippet for executing regex search and capturing different parts of the string based on the regular expression
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 | public class RegexTest { public static void main(String[] args) { String name = "01_My-File.pdf"; match(name); match("09_03_12File.docx"); match("09_03_12File.q123"); } public static void match(String input){ System.out.println("********* Analysing " + input+" *********"); String regex = "([0-9]+)([_])(.*)([\\.])([A-Za-z]+)"; Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex); Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(input); if (!matcher.matches()){ System.out.println("Input not matches regex"); return; } System.out.println("Matches: " + matcher.matches()); String number = matcher.group(1); System.out.println("Index: " + number); String fileName = matcher.group(3); System.out.println("FileName: " + fileName); String extension = matcher.group(5); System.out.println("Extension: " + extension); }} |
The groups are captured by using (). In the regular expression above ([0-9]+)([_])(.*)([\.])([A-Za-z]+)
- the first group is defined as a number with at least 1 digit
- the second group is the fixed character _
- the third group is any text.
- the fourth group is the fixed character. (we have to escape
.using \\ because in the regular expression a.means any character or symbol or space or number). - the fifth group is a group of characters with length > 0.
We use the Pattern class to compile the regular expression and match the input using it to result in a Matcher instance. This Matcher has information about the result of the regular expression match.
Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Mohamed Sanaulla, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: How to use regular expression in Java? Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
Hi…
I’m Elena gillbert.Regular Expressions or Regex (in short) is an API for defining String patterns that can be used for searching, manipulating and editing a string in Java. Email validation and passwords are few areas of strings where Regex are widely used to define the constraints. Regular Expressions are provided under java.util.regex package. This consists of 3 classes and 1 interface.