正则表达式（Regex） 第一天

1. Regular Expressions

1.1.  Overview

A regular expression define a search pattern for strings. This pattern may match one or several times or not at all for a given string. The abbreviation for regular expression is "regex".

A simple example for a regular expression is a (literal) string. For example the regex "Hello World" will match exactly the phrase "Hello World". Another example for a regular expression is "." (dot) which matches any single character; it would match for example "a" or "z" or "1".

1.2.  Usage

Regular expressions can be used to search, edit and manipulate text.

Regular expressions are used in several programming languages, e.g. Java but also Perl, Groovy, etc. Unfortunately each language / program supports regex slightly different.

The pattern defined by the regular expression is applied on the string from left to right. Once a source character has been used in a match, it cannot be reused. For example the regex "aba" will match "ababababa" only two times (aba_aba__).

1.3.  Junit

Some of the following examples use JUnit to validate the result. You should be able to adjust them in case if you don't want to use JUnit. To learn about JUnit please see JUnit Tutorial .

2. Regular Expressions

The following is an overview of regular expressions. This chapter is supposed to be a references for the different regex elements.

2.1. Common matching symbols

Table 1. 

Regular Expression	Description
.	Matches any sign
^regex	regex must match at the beginning of the line
regex$	Finds regex must match at the end of the line
[abc]	Set definition, can match the letter a or b or c
[abc][vz]	Set definition, can match a or b or c followed by either v or z
[^abc]	When a "^" appears as the first character inside [] when it negates the pattern. This can match any character except a or b or c
[a-d1-7]	Ranges, letter between a and d and figures from 1 to 7, will not match d1
X|Z	Finds X or Z
XZ	Finds X directly followed by Z
$	Checks if a line end follows

2.2. Metacharacters

The following metacharacters have a pre-defined meaning and make certain common pattern easier to use, e.g. \d instead of [0..9].

Table 2. 

Regular Expression	Description
\d	Any digit, short for [0-9]
\D	A non-digit, short for [^0-9]
\s	A whitespace character, short for [ \t\n\x0b\r\f]
\S	A non-whitespace character, for short for [^\s]
\w	A word character, short for [a-zA-Z_0-9]
\W	A non-word character [^\w]
\S+	Several non-whitespace characters

2.3. Quantifier

A quantifier defines how often an element can occur. The symbols ?, *, + and {} define the quantity of the regular expressions

Table 3. 

Regular Expression	Description	Examples
*	Occurs zero or more times, is short for {0,}	X* - Finds no or several letter X, .* - any character sequence
+	Occurs one or more times, is short for {1,}	X+ - Finds one or several letter X
?	Occurs no or one times, ? is short for {0,1}	X? -Finds no or exactly one letter X
{X}	Occurs X number of times, {} describes the order of the preceding liberal	\d{3} - Three digits, .{10} - any character sequence of length 10
{X,Y}	.Occurs between X and Y times,	\d{1,4}- \d must occur at least once and at a maximum of four
*?	? after a qualifier makes it a "reluctant quantifier", it tries to find the smallest match.

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