Book Image

Java 9 Regular Expressions

By : Anubhava Srivastava
Book Image

Java 9 Regular Expressions

By: Anubhava Srivastava

Overview of this book

Regular expressions are a powerful tool in the programmer's toolbox and allow pattern matching. They are also used for manipulating text and data. This book will provide you with the know-how (and practical examples) to solve real-world problems using regex in Java. You will begin by discovering what regular expressions are and how they work with Java. This easy-to-follow guide is a great place from which to familiarize yourself with the core concepts of regular expressions and to master its implementation with the features of Java 9. You will learn how to match, extract, and transform text by matching specific words, characters, and patterns. You will learn when and where to apply the methods for finding patterns in digits, letters, Unicode characters, and string literals. Going forward, you will learn to use zero-length assertions and lookarounds, parsing the source code, and processing the log files. Finally, you will master tips, tricks, and best practices in regex with Java.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Started with Regular Expressions

Optimization and performance enhancement tips


Let's discuss some optimization techniques and performance enhancement guidelines.

Use a compiled form of regular expressions

Compile your string regex pattern using the Pattern.compile(String) method call followed by calls to the Matcher APIs instead of calling shorthand methods in string, such as matches(), replaceAll, and replaceFirst, especially when these matching or replacement methods are invoked repeatedly inside a loop. Repeated calls to String.matches() or any other regex-based method defined in the String API will compile the String regex pattern every time; this can be very time-consuming for a complex regex pattern.

Use a negated character class instead of the greedy and slow .* or .+

Wherever possible, use negated character classes instead of the potential performance draining patterns (.* or .+), as follows:

param1=[^&]+&param2=[^&]+&param3=[^&]+$ 

Avoid using slow-performing quantifiers, as follows:

param1=.+&amp...