Java 101: Regular expressions in Java

The first half of this tutorial introduced you to regular expressions and the Regex API. You learned about the Pattern class, then worked through examples demonstrating regex constructs, from basic pattern matching with literal strings to more complex matches using ranges, boundary matchers, and quantifiers.
Pattern, Matcher, and PatternSyntaxException classes. You'll also be introduced to two tools that use regular expressions to simplify common coding tasks. The first extracts comments from code for documentation purposes. The second is a reusable library for performing lexical analysis, which is an essential component of assemblers, compilers, and similar software.

Explore the Regex API

Pattern, Matcher, and PatternSyntaxException are the three classes that comprise the Regex API. Each class offers methods that you can use to integrate regexes into your code.

Pattern methods

An instance of the Pattern class describes a compiled regex, also known as a pattern. Regexes are compiled to increase performance during pattern-matching operations. The following static methods support compilation.