Regular expressions in Ruby versus Java

Ruby supports regular expressions as a language feature without the inclusion of any special classes or modules. Java on the other hand does native regular expression support and it requires the use of special regular expression packages to use them.

Ruby regexp support in more depth

Since Ruby borrows it syntax from Perl the is nothing more than the simple syntax of:

/pattern/modifiers

Java regexp support in more depth

Java has been around for a while have has never had native regexp support. Because of this regular expression packages had to be created. There was no comprehensive support for regexp support from Java's main contributor, Sun, until Java 4. Because of this there are multiple 3rd party regexp packages for Java floating around:

java.util.regex The most widely used for regular expressions now due to its inclusion in the JDK since Java 4
Jakarta Around since 1996, Jakarta was donated to the Apache Software Foundation and is under an open-source, BSD style license
dk.brics.automaton Automaton is known for being the fastest of the Java regexp implementations
And the list goes on...

Examples

For the purpose of these examples we will assume that the Java package being used is java.util.regex

Search for text and replace

Collect matches

References

-- Michael Frisch (Tuesday, June 3, 2008)

CSC/ECE 517 Summer 2008/wiki1 1 mf

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