Regular Expressions, Partial Strings

Hi.

I am writing data entry routines for an application, and would
like to validate input for a JTextField according to a regular
expression - this means not only validation upon entry of the
whole string (end of edit), but validation with character-by-
character input.

The problem is that a partial string is likely to be invalid
according to a regular expression, but not break the rules for
partial matching according to that expression.

Eg.

If the regular expression is
[0]{2}

The string "a" would be neither a partial or whole match.
The string "0" would be a partial match, not a whole one.
The string "00" would be both a partial and a whole match.


I have been using GNU's regular expression package for Java,
(see www.cacas.org/java/gnu/regexp/) which is excellent but
does not seem to provide for validation in this way.
Masks on input (Eg. date is seen as __-__-__) are not
sufficient for my purposes as these enforce length
restrictions on the string, and rarely provide any further
intelligence for validation.

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Paul

Hi Paul,

I'm not the authority on this, but java does have a regex package called
java.util.regex; see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/ap.../Pattern.html.

http://www.savarese.org/oro/downloads/ provides the oro matcher. This is
the regex engine used by jpython in its java implementation of Python.

http://www.javaregex.com/ provides a regex engine with Perl5 capabilities.

http://www.meurrens.org/ip-Links/java/regex/ is an index of more java/regex
resources.

--A

I knew that too, but that wasn't the question that Bikhod asked.

PC2

"ig" <igrobyc@juno.com> wrote in message news:3ba40a32$1@news.devx.com...
>
> Hi Paul,
>
> I'm not the authority on this, but java does have a regex package called
> java.util.regex; see
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4/docs/ap.../Pattern.html.
>
> http://www.savarese.org/oro/downloads/ provides the oro matcher. This is
> the regex engine used by jpython in its java implementation of Python.
>
> http://www.javaregex.com/ provides a regex engine with Perl5 capabilities.
>
> http://www.meurrens.org/ip-Links/java/regex/ is an index of more
java/regex
> resources.
>
> --A
>