What's wrong with the regular expression?
Hi all,
For the life of me I can not figure out what is wrong with this regular expression
.*\bA specific phrase\.\b.*
This is just an example the actual phrase can be an specific phrase. My problem comes when the specific phrase ends in a period. I've escaped the period but it still gives me an error. The only time I don't get an error is when I take off the end boundry character which will not suffice as a solution. I need to be able to capture all the text before and after said phrase. If the phrase doesn't have a period it would look like this...
.*\bA specific phrase\b.*
which works fine. So what is it about the \.\b combination that is not matching?
I've been banging my head on this for a while and I'm getting nowhere.
The application highlights text that comes from a server. The user builds custom highlights that have some options. Highlight entire line, match partial word, and ignore case. The code that builds my pattern is here
String strHighlight = _strHighlight;
strHighlight = strHighlight.replaceAll("\\*","\\\\*");
strHighlight = strHighlight.replaceAll("\\.","\\\\.");
String strPattern = strHighlight;
if(_bEntireParagraph)
{
if(_bPartialWord)
strPattern =".*" + strHighlight +".*";
else
strPattern =".*\\b" + strHighlight +"\\b.*";
}
else
{
if(_bPartialWord)
strPattern = strHighlight;
else
strPattern ="\\b" + strHighlight +"\\b";
}
if(_bIgnoreCase)
_patHighlight = Pattern.compile(strPattern, Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
else
_patHighlight = Pattern.compile(strPattern);
So for example I matching the phrase: The dog ate the cat. And that phrase came over in the following text:Look there's a dog. The dog ate the cat. "Oh my!"
And my user has the entire line and ignore case options selected then my regex woud look like this:.*\bThe dog ate the cat\b.*
That should get highlighted, but for some reason it doesn't. Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't the regex read as follows:
any characters
word boundry
The dog ate the cat[period]
word boundry
any characters until newline.
Any help will be much appreciated
