Regular Expression【DOC精选】.doc

Supplement: Regular Expressions For Introduction to Java Programming By Y. Daniel Liang side remark: why regular expression? Often you need to write the code to validate user input such as to check whether the input is a number, a string with all lowercase letters, or a social security number. How do you write this type of code? A simple and effective way to accomplish this task is to use the regular expression. side remark: regular expression side remark: regex A regular expression (abbreviated regex) is a string that describes a pattern for matching a set of strings. Regular expression is a powerful tool for string manipulations. You can use regular expressions for matching, replacing, and splitting strings. 1 Matching Strings side remark: matches(regex) Let us begin with the matches method in the String class. At first glance, the matches method is very similar to the equals method. For example, the following two statements both evaluate to true. Java.matches(Java); Java.equals(Java); However, the matches method is more powerful. It can match not only a fixed string, but also a set of strings that follow a pattern. For example, the following statements all evaluate to true. Java is fun.matches(Java.*) Java is cool.matches(Java.*) Java is powerful.matches(Java.*) Java.* in the preceding statements is a regular expression. It describes a string pattern that begins with Java followed by any zero or more characters. Here, the substring .* matches any zero or more characters. 2 Regular Expression Syntax A regular expression consists of literal characters and special symbols. Table 1 lists some frequently used syntax for regular expressions. Table 1: Frequently Used Regular Expressions NOTE side remark: backslash (\) Backslash is a special character that starts an escape sequence in a string. So you need to use \\d in Java to represent \d. NOTE side remark: whitespace Recall that a whitespace (or a whitespace character) is any character which