use Perl

Java finally catches up to Perl (and Python, Tcl)

posted by pudge on 2002.02.14 18:07   

rjray writes "Over at /. they're reporting that Sun has finally released the first official version of their Java 2 SDK version 1.4. Read the release notes here. Java finally has native support of regular expressions, one of the first things I found lacking when I took a shot at Java programming some time ago. The regex's are even referred to as "Perl-like" in at least one place, maybe more!"

• Yeah, but (Score:0)

  by djberg96 (2603)

  ...it's still dirt slow

  ...and overly verbose
• Not very Perl-like.... (Score:2, Informative)

  by VSarkiss (704)

  The example program [sun.com] takes 92 lines to implement a file grep. It implements the pattern .*\r?\n, and if you wonder why that's bad, read Ovid's Death to Dot Star post [perlmonks.org] over at PerlMonks. (I'm presuming the Java regex engine backtracks, like other regex engines I know of.)
  • Re:Not very Perl-like.... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ovid (2709)

    Hmmm... now I'm rather curious as to what's going on here. Here's the regex code to match a line:

    // Pattern used to parse lines
    private static Pattern linePattern
    = Pattern.compile(".*\r?\n");
    

    I don't think VSarkiss' criticism of the dot star is appropriate in this case as Java documentation [sun.com] states that the dot does not match a line terminator. However, they appear to have goofed up the line terminator! What about \r on Macs? From what I can tell from their docs, the carriage return/newli
  • Re:Not very Perl-like.... (Score:2, Informative)

    by Desmodromic (2828)

    Argh. Don't have to convince me that Java is a big fat slug, but let's be fair: The first 43 lines of that are comments. A far cry from Perl, but only half as far ...
    • Re:Not very Perl-like.... (Score:0, Redundant)

      by VSarkiss (704)

      I only counted the code, not the comments. With the comments it's 135 lines.
• Severely b0rken (Score:3, Informative)

  by Matts (1087) on 2002.02.15 2:08 (#4557) Journal

  I believe there's something broken about Java's split() fuction from the regexp class. If you do split(/=/, "foo=bar=20", 2) in Java, then you get two return values, as you would expect. What you might not expect is those return values to be "foo" and "bar". I know this was the case in the betas, but I haven't checked if they fixed this or not. I'd love it if someone could confirm that.

  Reply to This

  • Re:Severely b0rken (Score:3, Informative)

    by manu4ever (2830)

    This was fixed between beta 2 and beta 3. eg:import java.util.regex.*; public class Regexp { public static void main(String[] args) { Pattern p = Pattern.compile("="); String[] theStrings = p.split("foo=bar=20", 2); for (int i=0; itheStrings.length; i++) { System.out.println(i + " : " + theStrings[i]); } } } Gives 0 : foo 1 : bar=20 as expected on 1.4.0 beta3 (and final release), but 0 : foo 1 : bar on the beta 2.
  • Re:Severely b0rken (Score:2)

    by jdavidb (1361)

    I don't understand your example. split(/=/, "foo=bar=20", 2) I presume the "2" means "only give me two return values," because you say we'd expect to get two return values. Without the 2 I'd expect to get a list of {foo bar 2}, with the 2 I'd expect to get what you say I wouldn't expect: {foo bar}. Huh?

    --
    J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
    • Never mind... (Score:2)

      by jdavidb (1361)

      Oh, wow! I just learned something about Perl.

      I've rarely used the final parameter to split, so I didn't know.

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
      • Re:Never mind... (Score:2)

        by Matts (1087)

        That final parameter is *incredibly* useful. Imagine parsing email headers, or cookies, or config files, or... the list goes on. Glad to hear they fixed it though.
• Regexps are not everything (Score:1)

  by Shlomi Fish (918)

  Perl has other features besides Regexps, which I like very much. Stuff like nested data-structures, dynamic typing, functions as first-order values, closures, eval, multiple-inheritance, etc. etc.

  I don't think Java has all that, or should. That's why I still prefer Perl for most purposes.
• Perl like regexes for Java (Score:1)

  by erikharrison (2764)

  Yes, the new Java regex package is almost identical to Perl regexes. The description is here [sun.com], including a description of the differences, most of which seem to be insignifigant (although I like having character classes be an allowable part of a character class.)
• separate java library offers regexp too (Score:1)

  by jeppe (2852)

  The Jakarta subproject Oro [apache.org] offers perl5-compatible regexps. I never really stress-tested it, but it did what I needed to do (which was doing basic sanity testing on email addresses).