This small package provides a facility for textual pattern matching with regular expressions. Pattern objects represent regular expressions, which are specified using a syntax very close to the one used by the Perl programming language. The Matcher class encapsulates a Pattern and a java.lang.CharSequence of text, and defines various methods for matching the pattern to the text. In Java 5.0, the MatchResult interface represents the result of a match. Matcher implements this interface and can be queried directly.

In addition to the pattern matching methods defined in this package, the java.lang.String class has been augmented in Java 1.4 with a number of convenience methods for matching strings against regular expressions that are specified in their text form as strings, rather than in their compiled form as Pattern objects. Applications with simple pattern matching needs can use these convenience methods and may never have to directly use the Pattern or Matcher classes.

Interfaces

public interface MatchResult;

Classes

public final class Matcher implements MatchResult;
public final class Pattern implements Serializable;

Exceptions

public class PatternSyntaxException extends IllegalArgumentException;