Regular expressions and Java I/O
Most of the examples so far have shown regular expressions applied to static strings. The following example shows one way to apply regular expressions to search for matches in a file. Inspired by Unix’s grep, JGrep.java takes two arguments: a filename and the regular expression that you want to match. The output shows each line where a match occurs and the match position(s) within the line.
//: c12:JGrep.java
// A very simple version of the "grep" program.
// {Args: JGrep.java "\\b[Ssct]\\w+"}
import java.io.*;
import java.util.regex.*;
import java.util.*;
import com.bruceeckel.util.*;
public class JGrep {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
if(args.length < 2) {
System.out.println("Usage: java JGrep file regex");
System.exit(0);
}
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(args[1]);
// Iterate through the lines of the input file:
ListIterator it = new TextFile(args[0]).listIterator();
while(it.hasNext()) {
Matcher m = p.matcher((String)it.next());
while(m.find())
System.out.println(it.nextIndex() + ": " +
m.group() + ": " + m.start());
}
}
} ///:~
The file is opened as a TextFile object (these were introduced earlier in this chapter). Since a TextFile contains the lines of the file in an ArrayList, from that array a ListIterator is produced. The result is an iterator that will allow you to move through the lines of the file (forward and backward).
Each input line is used to produce a Matcher, and the result is scanned with find( ). Note that the ListIterator.nextIndex( ) keeps track of the line numbers.
The test arguments open the JGrep.java file to read as input, and search for words starting with [Ssct].
