Pattern searching

Question

I want to implement pattern ' * ' text matching on java. What is the simplest way to do this? Is Pattern.java the best solution for this?

Answer 1

Have a look into the regular expression package java.util.regex. You find a good starting point here.

Answer 2

If I understand correctly you want to match the text occurring between two single quotes in a string. The regex for this is '.*' and not '*'. Code for this will look like this

String input = "abcd'efg'hij";
Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("'.*'").matcher(input); //initializes a matcher
System.out.println("Found ? " + matcher.find() + 
                   "\nFound what ? "+ matcher.group()); //prints 'efg'

In case you want to match '*' literally then use the regex '\\*' (escape * with a \)

Check out documentation on java.util.regex.Pattern and java.util.regex.Matcher classes.

Answer 3

There isn't a built in glob-matcher for Java, but you can easily convert a glob to a regex and use a regex library.