Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Book Image

Groovy 2 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Get up to speed with Groovy, a language for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that integrates features of both object-oriented and functional programming. This book will show you the powerful features of Groovy 2 applied to real-world scenarios and how the dynamic nature of the language makes it very simple to tackle problems that would otherwise require hours or days of research and implementation. Groovy 2 Cookbook contains a vast number of recipes covering many facets of today's programming landscape. From language-specific topics such as closures and metaprogramming, to more advanced applications of Groovy flexibility such as DSL and testing techniques, this book gives you quick solutions to everyday problems. The recipes in this book start from the basics of installing Groovy and running your first scripts and continue with progressively more advanced examples that will help you to take advantage of the language's amazing features. Packed with hundreds of tried-and-true Groovy recipes, Groovy 2 Cookbook includes code segments covering many specialized APIs to work with files and collections, manipulate XML, work with REST services and JSON, create asynchronous tasks, and more. But Groovy does more than just ease traditional Java development: it brings modern programming features to the Java platform like closures, duck-typing, and metaprogramming. In this new book, you'll find code examples that you can use in your projects right away along with a discussion about how and why the solution works. Focusing on what's useful and tricky, Groovy 2 Cookbook offers a wealth of useful code for all Java and Groovy programmers, not just advanced practitioners.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Groovy 2 Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Searching strings with regular expressions


The regular expression API became part of JDK since v1.4. Pattern, Matcher, and String classes contain functionality for regular expression matching and replacement that may not always be obvious, especially for complex use cases.

Luckily, Groovy adds some syntax sugar and functionality to support regular expressions in a more native fashion that will be demonstrated in this recipe.

Getting ready

We assume that you already have familiarity with regular expressions. This recipe will only focus on the features added by Groovy to the already rich infrastructure offered by Java to deal with regular expressions.

How to do it...

To begin with, Groovy offers a simple way to create Pattern objects using the ~/pattern/ notation:

Pattern pattern = ~/^.*?groovy.*$/

The previous pattern will match any text that contains the word groovy in it.

In fact, slashes at the beginning and the end of a pattern represent an alternative way to define strings in Groovy. The following...