Package totalcross.util.regex

Class Matcher

  • All Implemented Interfaces:
    MatchResult
    public class Matcher
extends java.lang.Object
implements MatchResult
    Matcher instance is an automaton that actually performs matching. It provides the following methods:
  • searching for a matching substrings : matcher.find() or matcher.findAll();
  • testing whether a text matches a whole pattern : matcher.matches();
  • testing whether the text matches the beginning of a pattern : matcher.matchesPrefix();
  • searching with custom options : matcher.find(int options)

    Obtaining results
    After the search succeded, i.e. if one of above methods returned true one may obtain an information on the match:

  • may check whether some group is captured : matcher.isCaptured(int);
  • may obtain start and end positions of the match and its length : matcher.start(int),matcher.end(int),matcher.length(int);
  • may obtain match contents as String : matcher.group(int).
    The same way can be obtained the match prefix and suffix information. The appropriate methods are grouped in MatchResult interface, which the Matcher class implements.
    Matcher objects are not thread-safe, so only one thread may use a matcher instance at a time. Note, that Pattern objects are thread-safe(the same instanse may be shared between multiple threads), and the typical tactics in multithreaded applications is to have one Pattern instance per expression(a singleton), and one Matcher object per thread.