Programming Groovy 2

5.5 Regular Expressions

The JDK package ​java.util.regex​ contains the API for pattern-matching with regular expressions (RegEx). For a detailed discussion of RegEx, refer to Jeffrey Friedl’s Mastering Regular Expressions [Fri97]. ​String​’s ​replaceFirst​ and ​replaceAll​ methods, among other methods, make good use of RegEx pattern-matching. Groovy adds operators and symbols to make it easier to program with RegEx.

Groovy provides the operator ​~​ to easily create a RegEx pattern. This operator maps to ​String​’s ​negate​ method:

obj = ~"hello"
println obj.getClass().name

The output shows the type of the instance created:

java.util.regex.Pattern

The previous example shows that ​~​ applied to ​String