Java Cookbook

Chapter 4. Pattern Matching with Regular Expressions

Introduction

Suppose you have been on the Internet for a few years and have been very faithful about saving all your correspondence, just in case you (or your lawyers, or the prosecution) need a copy. The result is that you have a 50-megabyte disk partition dedicated to saved mail. And let’s further suppose that you remember that there is one letter, somewhere in there, from someone named Angie or Anjie. Or was it Angy? But you don’t remember what you called it or where you stored it. Obviously, you will have to go look for it.

But while some of you go and try to open up all 15,000,000 documents in a word processor, I’ll just find it with one simple command. Any system that provides regular expression support will allow me to search for the pattern:

An[^ dn]

in all the files. The “A” and the “n” match themselves, in effect finding words that begin with “An”, while the cryptic [^ dn] requires the “An” to be followed by a character other than a space (to eliminate the very common English word “an” at the start of a sentence) or “d” (to eliminate the common word “and”) or “n” (to eliminate Anne, Announcing, etc.). Has your word processor gotten past its splash screen yet? Well, it doesn’t matter, because I’ve already found the missing file. To find the answer, I just typed the command:^[14]

grep 'An[^ dn]' *

Regular expressions, or REs for short, provide a concise and precise specification of patterns to be matched in text. Java ...