CSC/ECE 517 Summer 2008/wiki1 1 rp
Regular Expressions in Ruby vs. Java
Ruby and Java both support Regular Expressions, but generally speaking, Ruby's dynamic typing and native regular expression support allow for equivalent or similar functions to be performed more simply and with less code.
Ruby can perform most regular expression related functions using a combination of the String and Regexp classes. The String class has several methods that take a Regexp as a parameter, and similarly the Regexp class has methods that take a String as a parameter. Ruby also provides a shorthand for defining regular expressions, a string surrounded by forward slashes: Regexp.new('test') and /test/ are equivalent.
Mostly, Java does not have native support for regular expressions. While the String class has a few methods that can perform related functions, they do not necessarily follow the conventional rules of regular expressions. Proper regular expression support is available in Java through several packages, most notably java.util.regex, which is Sun's standard package available in Java 1.4+. This package provides two classes, Pattern and Matcher, which are respectively used to define and operate on regular expressions. These classes work in conjunction with the String class to perform regular expression functions.