CSC/ECE 517 Summer 2008/wiki1 1 mb

Regular expression support in Java and Ruby

What are regular expressions?

Regular expressions provide an efficient way to match patterns against strings. Both Java and Ruby use a regular expression syntax similar to Perl.

Perl regular expression syntax

How regular expressions are handled in Java

In Java, regular expressions are supported using the java.util.regex package.
Package summary for java.util.regex

The java.util.regex package contains two classes:
The Pattern class and the Matcher class.

Instances of the Pattern class are used to represent regular expressions. Instances of the Matcher class are used to match the regular expressions described by the Pattern object against strings. The Pattern class provides methods to facilitate splitting strings based upon provided regular expressions, while the Matcher class provides methods that allow patterns to be found, replaced, and examined further.

How regular expressions are handled in Ruby

In Ruby, regular expressions are supported via the Regexp class.
Class summary for Regexp

The match and last_match methods of the Regexp class return MatchData objects.
Class summary for MatchData

Other useful links

Basic regular expression syntax
Advanced regular expression syntax
java.util.regex Examples from The Java Developers Almanac 1.4