Follow Techotopia on Twitter

On-line Guides
All Guides
eBook Store
iOS / Android
Linux for Beginners
Office Productivity
Linux Installation
Linux Security
Linux Utilities
Linux Virtualization
Linux Kernel
System/Network Admin
Programming
Scripting Languages
Development Tools
Web Development
GUI Toolkits/Desktop
Databases
Mail Systems
openSolaris
Eclipse Documentation
Techotopia.com
Virtuatopia.com
Answertopia.com

How To Guides
Virtualization
General System Admin
Linux Security
Linux Filesystems
Web Servers
Graphics & Desktop
PC Hardware
Windows
Problem Solutions
Privacy Policy

  




 

 

Thinking in Java
Prev Contents / Index Next

Regular expressions and Java I/O

Most of the examples so far have shown regular expressions applied to static strings. The following example shows one way to apply regular expressions to search for matches in a file. Inspired by Unix’s grep, JGrep.java takes two arguments: a filename and the regular expression that you want to match. The output shows each line where a match occurs and the match position(s) within the line.

//: c12:JGrep.java
// A very simple version of the "grep" program.
// {Args: JGrep.java "\\b[Ssct]\\w+"}
import java.io.*;
import java.util.regex.*;
import java.util.*;
import com.bruceeckel.util.*;

public class JGrep {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    if(args.length < 2) {
      System.out.println("Usage: java JGrep file regex");
      System.exit(0);
    }
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile(args[1]);
    // Iterate through the lines of the input file:
    ListIterator it = new TextFile(args[0]).listIterator();
    while(it.hasNext()) {
      Matcher m = p.matcher((String)it.next());
      while(m.find())
        System.out.println(it.nextIndex() + ": " +
          m.group() + ": " + m.start());
    }
  }
} ///:~


The file is opened as a TextFile object (these were introduced earlier in this chapter). Since a TextFile contains the lines of the file in an ArrayList, from that array a ListIterator is produced. The result is an iterator that will allow you to move through the lines of the file (forward and backward).

Each input line is used to produce a Matcher, and the result is scanned with find( ). Note that the ListIterator.nextIndex( ) keeps track of the line numbers.

The test arguments open the JGrep.java file to read as input, and search for words starting with [Ssct].
Thinking in Java
Prev Contents / Index Next


 
 
   Reproduced courtesy of Bruce Eckel, MindView, Inc. Design by Interspire