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"You must turn and face the tiger to learn it is made of paper."
— Zen saying
This chapter explores some of the more advanced features of regular expressions in J2SE. The goal is to provide a point of reference for the more complex regex tools and concepts available to Java developers. This chapter should be a resource you can come back to when you need a refresher on a J2SE regex concept.
Of course, there's no learning tool as useful as actually writing code, so I encourage you to try out these concepts on your own. This chapter introduces a variety of concepts, including groups, subgroups, noncapturing groups, greedy qualifiers, positive qualifiers, reluctant qualifiers, positive lookaheads, negative lookaheads, positive lookbehinds, and negative lookbehinds. The final section of this chapter focuses on increasing the efficiency of your regular expressions.
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The examples in this chapter are intentionally simple so as to clearly illustrate the mechanisms being discussed. More complex examples, such as those used professionally, are explored in Chapter 5 and in the Appendixes. |
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