The Java Regex or Regular Expression is an API to define a pattern for searching or manipulating strings.
khisa Hamphrey ([email protected])
A regular expression defines a search pattern for strings. The abbreviation for regular expression is regex. The search pattern can be anything from a simple character, a fixed string or a complex expression containing special characters describing the pattern. The pattern defined by the regex may match one or several times or not at all for a given string.
Regular expressions can be used to search, edit and manipulate text.
The process of analyzing or modifying a text with a regex is called: The regular expression is applied to the text/string. The pattern defined by the regex is applied on the text from left to right. Once a source character has been used in a match, it cannot be reused. For example, the regex aba will match ababababa only two times (aba_aba__).