I have this small piece of code
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("[a-z]"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
Supposed to print
dkoe
but it prints nothing!!
Welcome to Java's misnamed .matches() method... It tries and matches ALL the input. Unfortunately, other languages have followed suit :(
If you want to see if the regex matches an input text, use a Pattern, a Matcher and the .find() method of the matcher:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[a-z]");
Matcher m = p.matcher(inputstring);
if (m.find())
// match
If what you want is indeed to see if an input only has lowercase letters, you can use .matches(), but you need to match one or more characters: append a + to your character class, as in [a-z]+. Or use ^[a-z]+$ and .find().
[a-z] matches a single char between a and z. So, if your string was just "d", for example, then it would have matched and been printed out.
You need to change your regex to [a-z]+ to match one or more chars.
String.matches returns whether the whole string matches the regex, not just any substring.
java's implementation of regexes try to match the whole string
that's different from perl regexes, which try to find a matching part
if you want to find a string with nothing but lower case characters, use the pattern [a-z]+
if you want to find a string containing at least one lower case character, use the pattern .*[a-z].*
Used
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("[a-z]+"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
I have faced the same problem once:
Pattern ptr = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z][\\']?[a-zA-Z\\s]+$");
The above failed!
Pattern ptr = Pattern.compile("(^[a-zA-Z][\\']?[a-zA-Z\\s]+$)");
The above worked with pattern within ( and ).
Your regular expression [a-z] doesn't match dkoe since it only matches Strings of lenght 1. Use something like [a-z]+.
you must put at least a capture () in the pattern to match, and correct pattern like this:
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("(^[a-z]+$)"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
You can make your pattern case insensitive by doing:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[a-z]+", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
Related
I have this small piece of code
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("[a-z]"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
Supposed to print
dkoe
but it prints nothing!!
Welcome to Java's misnamed .matches() method... It tries and matches ALL the input. Unfortunately, other languages have followed suit :(
If you want to see if the regex matches an input text, use a Pattern, a Matcher and the .find() method of the matcher:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[a-z]");
Matcher m = p.matcher(inputstring);
if (m.find())
// match
If what you want is indeed to see if an input only has lowercase letters, you can use .matches(), but you need to match one or more characters: append a + to your character class, as in [a-z]+. Or use ^[a-z]+$ and .find().
[a-z] matches a single char between a and z. So, if your string was just "d", for example, then it would have matched and been printed out.
You need to change your regex to [a-z]+ to match one or more chars.
String.matches returns whether the whole string matches the regex, not just any substring.
java's implementation of regexes try to match the whole string
that's different from perl regexes, which try to find a matching part
if you want to find a string with nothing but lower case characters, use the pattern [a-z]+
if you want to find a string containing at least one lower case character, use the pattern .*[a-z].*
Used
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("[a-z]+"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
I have faced the same problem once:
Pattern ptr = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z][\\']?[a-zA-Z\\s]+$");
The above failed!
Pattern ptr = Pattern.compile("(^[a-zA-Z][\\']?[a-zA-Z\\s]+$)");
The above worked with pattern within ( and ).
Your regular expression [a-z] doesn't match dkoe since it only matches Strings of lenght 1. Use something like [a-z]+.
you must put at least a capture () in the pattern to match, and correct pattern like this:
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("(^[a-z]+$)"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
You can make your pattern case insensitive by doing:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[a-z]+", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
I have this small piece of code
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("[a-z]"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
Supposed to print
dkoe
but it prints nothing!!
Welcome to Java's misnamed .matches() method... It tries and matches ALL the input. Unfortunately, other languages have followed suit :(
If you want to see if the regex matches an input text, use a Pattern, a Matcher and the .find() method of the matcher:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[a-z]");
Matcher m = p.matcher(inputstring);
if (m.find())
// match
If what you want is indeed to see if an input only has lowercase letters, you can use .matches(), but you need to match one or more characters: append a + to your character class, as in [a-z]+. Or use ^[a-z]+$ and .find().
[a-z] matches a single char between a and z. So, if your string was just "d", for example, then it would have matched and been printed out.
You need to change your regex to [a-z]+ to match one or more chars.
String.matches returns whether the whole string matches the regex, not just any substring.
java's implementation of regexes try to match the whole string
that's different from perl regexes, which try to find a matching part
if you want to find a string with nothing but lower case characters, use the pattern [a-z]+
if you want to find a string containing at least one lower case character, use the pattern .*[a-z].*
Used
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("[a-z]+"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
I have faced the same problem once:
Pattern ptr = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z][\\']?[a-zA-Z\\s]+$");
The above failed!
Pattern ptr = Pattern.compile("(^[a-zA-Z][\\']?[a-zA-Z\\s]+$)");
The above worked with pattern within ( and ).
Your regular expression [a-z] doesn't match dkoe since it only matches Strings of lenght 1. Use something like [a-z]+.
you must put at least a capture () in the pattern to match, and correct pattern like this:
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("(^[a-z]+$)"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
You can make your pattern case insensitive by doing:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[a-z]+", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
Objective: for a given term, I want to check if that term exist at the start of the word. For example if the term is 't'. then in the sentance:
"This is the difficult one Thats it"
I want it to return "true" because of :
This, the, Thats
so consider:
public class HelloWorld{
public static void main(String []args){
String term = "t";
String regex = "/\\b"+term+"[^\\b]*?\\b/gi";
String str = "This is the difficult one Thats it";
System.out.println(str.matches(regex));
}
}
I am getting following Exception:
Exception in thread "main" java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException:
Illegal/unsupported escape sequence near index 7
/\bt[^\b]*?\b/gi
^
at java.util.regex.Pattern.error(Pattern.java:1924)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.escape(Pattern.java:2416)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.range(Pattern.java:2577)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.clazz(Pattern.java:2507)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.sequence(Pattern.java:2030)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.expr(Pattern.java:1964)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Pattern.java:1665)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.<init>(Pattern.java:1337)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Pattern.java:1022)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.matches(Pattern.java:1128)
at java.lang.String.matches(String.java:2063)
at HelloWorld.main(HelloWorld.java:8)
Also the following does not work:
import java.util.regex.*;
public class HelloWorld{
public static void main(String []args){
String term = "t";
String regex = "\\b"+term+"gi";
//String regex = ".";
System.out.println(regex);
String str = "This is the difficult one Thats it";
System.out.println(str.matches(regex));
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex);
Matcher m = p.matcher(str);
System.out.println(m.find());
}
}
Example:
{ This , one, Two, Those, Thanks }
for words This Two Those Thanks; result should be true.
Thanks
Since you're using the Java regex engine, you need to write the expressions in a way Java understands. That means removing trailing and leading slashes and adding flags as (?<flags>) at the beginning of the expression.
Thus you'd need this instead:
String regex = "(?i)\\b"+term+".*?\\b"
Have a look at regular-expressions.info/java.html for more information. A comparison of supported features can be found here (just as an entry point): regular-expressions.info/refbasic.html
In Java we don't surround regex with / so instead of "/regex/flags" we just write regex. If you want to add flags you can do it with (?flags) syntax and place it in regex at position from which flag should apply, for instance a(?i)a will be able to find aa and aA but not Aa because flag was added after first a.
You can also compile your regex into Pattern like this
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex, flags);
where regex is String (again not enclosed with /) and flag is integer build from constants from Pattern like Pattern.DOTALL or when you need more flags you can use Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE|Pattern.MULTILINE.
Next thing which may confuse you is matches method. Most people are mistaken by its name, because they assume that it will try to check if it can find in string element which can be matched by regex, but in reality, it checks if entire string can be matched by regex.
What you seem to want is mechanism to test of some regex can be found at least once in string. In that case you may either
add .* at start and end of your regex to let other characters which are not part of element you want to find be matched by regex engine, but this way matches must iterate over entire string
use Matcher object build from Pattern (representing your regex), and use its find() method, which will iterate until it finds match for regex, or will find end of string. I prefer this approach because it will not need to iterate over entire string, but will stop when match will be found.
So your code could look like
String str = "This is the difficult one Thats it";
String term = "t";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\b"+term, Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(str);
System.out.println(matcher.find());
In case your term could contain some regex special characters but you want regex engine to treat them as normal characters you need to make sure that they will be escaped. To do this you can use Pattern.quote method which will add all necessary escapes for you, so instead of
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\b"+term, Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
for safety you should use
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\b"+Pattern.quote(term), Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
String regex = "(?i)\\b"+term;
In Java, the modifiers must be inserted between "(?" and ")" and there is a variant for turning them off again: "(?-" and ")".
For finding all words beginning with "T" or "t", you may want to use Matcher's find method repeatedly. If you just need the offset, Matcher's start method returns the offset.
If you need to match the full word, use
String regex = "(?i)\\b"+term + "\\w*";
String str = "This is the difficult one Thats it";
String term = "t";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("^[+"+term+"].*",Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
String[] strings = str.split(" ");
for (String s : strings) {
if (pattern.matcher(s).matches()) {
System.out.println(s+"-->"+true);
} else {
System.out.println(s+"-->"+false);
}
}
I have strings with parentheses and also escaped characters. I need to match against these characters and also delete them. In the following code, I use matches() and replaceAll() with the same regex, but the matches() returns false, while the replaceAll() seems to match just fine, because the replaceAll() executes and removes the characters. Can someone explain?
String input = "(aaaa)\\b";
boolean matchResult = input.matches("\\(|\\)|\\\\[a-z]+");
System.out.printf("matchResult=%s\n", matchResult);
String output = input.replaceAll("\\(|\\)|\\\\[a-z]+", "");
System.out.printf("INPUT: %s --> OUTPUT: %s\n", input, output);
Prints out:
matchResult=false
INPUT: (aaaa) --> OUTPUT: aaaa
matches matches the whole input, not part of it.
The regular expression \(|\)|\\[a-z]+ doesn't describe the whole word, but only parts of it, so in your case it fails.
What matches is doing has already been explained by Binyamin Sharet. I want to extend this a bit.
Java does not have a "findall" or a "g" modifier like other languages have it to get all matches at once.
The Java Matcher class knows only two methods to use a pattern against a string (without replacing it)
matches(): matches the whole string against the pattern
find(): returns the next match
If you want to get all things that fits your pattern, you need to use find() in a loop, something like this:
Pattern p = Pattern
.compile("\\(|\\)|\\\\[a-z]+");
Matcher m = p.matcher(text);
while(m.find()){
System.out.println(m.group(0));
}
or if you are only interested if your pattern exists in the string
if (m.find()) {
System.out.println(m.group());
} else {
System.out.println("not found");
}
I have this small piece of code
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("[a-z]"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
Supposed to print
dkoe
but it prints nothing!!
Welcome to Java's misnamed .matches() method... It tries and matches ALL the input. Unfortunately, other languages have followed suit :(
If you want to see if the regex matches an input text, use a Pattern, a Matcher and the .find() method of the matcher:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[a-z]");
Matcher m = p.matcher(inputstring);
if (m.find())
// match
If what you want is indeed to see if an input only has lowercase letters, you can use .matches(), but you need to match one or more characters: append a + to your character class, as in [a-z]+. Or use ^[a-z]+$ and .find().
[a-z] matches a single char between a and z. So, if your string was just "d", for example, then it would have matched and been printed out.
You need to change your regex to [a-z]+ to match one or more chars.
String.matches returns whether the whole string matches the regex, not just any substring.
java's implementation of regexes try to match the whole string
that's different from perl regexes, which try to find a matching part
if you want to find a string with nothing but lower case characters, use the pattern [a-z]+
if you want to find a string containing at least one lower case character, use the pattern .*[a-z].*
Used
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("[a-z]+"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
I have faced the same problem once:
Pattern ptr = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z][\\']?[a-zA-Z\\s]+$");
The above failed!
Pattern ptr = Pattern.compile("(^[a-zA-Z][\\']?[a-zA-Z\\s]+$)");
The above worked with pattern within ( and ).
Your regular expression [a-z] doesn't match dkoe since it only matches Strings of lenght 1. Use something like [a-z]+.
you must put at least a capture () in the pattern to match, and correct pattern like this:
String[] words = {"{apf","hum_","dkoe","12f"};
for(String s:words)
{
if(s.matches("(^[a-z]+$)"))
{
System.out.println(s);
}
}
You can make your pattern case insensitive by doing:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[a-z]+", Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);