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Match multiline text using regular expression

Asked 2010-09-06T13:14:15.397
208

I am trying to match a multi line text using Java. When I use the Pattern class with the Pattern.MULTILINE modifier, I am able to match, but I am not able to do so with (?m).

The same pattern with (?m) and using String.matches does not seem to work. I am sure I am missing something, but no idea what.

This is what I tried:

String test = "User Comments: This is \t a\ta \n test \n\n message \n";
        
String pattern1 = "User Comments: (\\W)*(\\S)*";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(pattern1, Pattern.MULTILINE);
System.out.println(p.matcher(test).find());  //true

String pattern2 = "(?m)User Comments: (\\W)*(\\S)*";
System.out.println(test.matches(pattern2));  //false - why?
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1 Answer

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str.matches(regex) behaves like Pattern.matches(regex, str) which attempts to match the entire input sequence against the pattern and returns

true if, and only if, the entire input sequence matches this matcher's pattern

Whereas matcher.find() attempts to find the next subsequence of the input sequence that matches the pattern and returns

true if, and only if, a subsequence of the input sequence matches this matcher's pattern

Thus the problem is with the regex. Try the following.

String test = "User Comments: This is \t a\ta \ntest\n\n message \n";

String pattern1 = "User Comments: [\\s\\S]*^test$[\\s\\S]*";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(pattern1, Pattern.MULTILINE);
System.out.println(p.matcher(test).find());  //true

String pattern2 = "(?m)User Comments: [\\s\\S]*^test$[\\s\\S]*";
System.out.println(test.matches(pattern2));  //true

Thus in short, the (\\W)*(\\S)* portion in your first regex matches an empty string as * means zero or more occurrences and the real matched string is User Comments: and not the whole string as you'd expect. The second one fails as it tries to match the whole string but it can't as \\W matches a non word character, ie [^a-zA-Z0-9_] and the first character is T, a word character.

answered 2010-09-06T14:44:09.447

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