Java Cookbook

Controlling Case in match( ) and subst( )

Problem

You want to find text regardless of case.

Solution

Use the flags static int variable RE.MATCH_CASEINDEPENDENT to indicate that matching should be case-independent (“fold” or ignore differences in case) or RE_MATCH_NORMAL to request normal, case-sensitive matching behavior. These flags can either be passed to the RE constructor method, as in:

// CaseMatch.java
RE r = new RE(pattern, RE.MATCH_CASEINDEPENDENT);
r.match(input);        // will match case-insensitively

or passed to the RE’s setMatchFlags( ) method before calling match( ), as in:

r.setMatchFlags(RE.MATCH_NORMAL);
r.match(input);        // will match case-sensitively
If we print the results of both match operations
+ jikes +E -d . CaseMatch.java
+ java CaseMatch
MATCH_CASEINDEPENDENT match true
MATCH_NORMAL match was false

The full source for this example is online as CaseMatch.java.