Regular Expressions - Named Capture Groups

I am porting some code from .NET to Java today, and found out about a very cool feature in regular expressions called Named Groups. Most regular expression implementations let you group text (which can then be used for back-references) using parenthesis, for example: my name is (pete). You then refer to the groups with numbers such as \1 or $1 to match the first group.
Python was the first language to introduce the ability to name groups in regular expressions, PHP along with .NET also supports them. For example my name is (?<fisrtname>pete) although it looks more complicated you can reference the group by name rather than by number. This is really handy in the code I'm porting because there are tons of regular expressions and the ordering of the groups may be different based on the pattern.
However it doesn't look like Java supports this feature, which is a bummer because we are going to have to implement it ourself by preparsing the pattern, and storing the order of the named groups.
It would be really cool if Java 1.6 supported this... Though I don't see any JSR's on the topic.
Tweet
Related Entries
- Cheat Sheet Roundup - Over 30 Cheatsheets for developers - September 1, 2005
Trackbacks
Comments
Marius
Jon
Post a Comment
Recent Entries
- Writing Secure CFML cfObjective 2013 Slides
- Upgrading to Java 7 on Linux
- J2EE Sessions in CF10 Uses Secure Cookies
- Learn about ColdFusion Security at cfObjective 2013
- Session Loss and Session Fixation in ColdFusion
- FuseGuard 2.3 Released
- CKEditor Spell Checker Plugin
- Adobe Says Go Ahead and Upgrade your ColdFusion JVM


add to del.icio.us


