In this chapter, we will introduce you to dedicated Java APIs for writing programs using regular expressions. Java provides a package, java.util.regex
, which contains all the classes and interfaces for handling regular expressions. This package is in the java.base
module, so we do not explicitly declare its use in the module-info.java
source file. The java.base
module is automatically required by all modules, and it contains the most important and basic JDK packages and classes. Regular expressions is such an important topic and tool that Java 9 experts decided to keep it inside the java.base
module.
We will cover the following classes and interfaces from this package:
- The
MatchResult
interface - Using
Pattern
class - Using
Matcher
class - Various methods of
Pattern
andMatcher
classes and how to use them for solving problems involving regular expressions