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Pattern Matching

First look at the normal code with + greedy quantifier. In this example we try to find sequences containing at least one a character. Hence our pattern is a+

  Pattern p = Pattern.compile("a+");
  Matcher m = p.matcher("ab4 5aaaa6_7ab");
  System.out.println("Pattern is " + m.pattern());
  while(m.find()) {
    System.out.println(m.start() + " " + m.group());
  }

We'll get quite expectable output

 Pattern is a+
 0 a
 5 aaaa
 12 a

+ sign is a greedy quantifier, therefore we got all a symbols starting from 5th position in one group. Now let's change + to * greedy quantifier in our pattern and execute the same code with a* pattern.

 0 a
 1
 2
 3
 4
 5 aaaa
 9
 10
 11
 12 a
 13
 14

As you see, we got a strange result. Do you have any idea about this result? I'll try to explain. Because of the nature of * quantifier, matcher looks for zero or more occurrences of the a character. That's why it gives every position in result, even after last character.

We'll have the similar result with ? quantifier. Only the line 5 will be spanned to 4 lines with a single a in each line.

Author: Jafar N.Aliyev (Jsoft)

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