Regular expressions
To finish this chapter, we’ll look at regular expressions, which were added in JDK 1.4 but have been integral to standard Unix utilities like sed and awk, and languages like Python and Perl (some would argue that they are predominant reason for Perl’s success). Technically, these are string manipulation tools (previously delegated to the String, StringBuffer, and StringTokenizer classes in Java), but they are typically used in conjunction with I/O, so it’s not too far-fetched to include them here.[66]
Regular expressions are powerful and flexible text-processing tools. They allow you to specify, programmatically, complex patterns of text that can be discovered in an input string. Once you discover these patterns, you can then react to them any way you want. Although the syntax of regular expressions can be intimidating at first, they provide a compact and dynamic language that can be employed to solve all sorts of string processing, matching and selection, editing, and verification problems in a completely general way.
