Working with Classes of Characters

A character class is created by putting the characters you want to match between brackets. For example, to match the lowercase characters a through z, use [a-z]. The following program demonstrates this technique:


// Use a character class. 
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class Main {
  public static void main(String args[]) {
    // Match lowercase words.
    Pattern pat = Pattern.compile("[a-z]+");
    Matcher mat = pat.matcher("this is a test.");
    while (mat.find()){
      System.out.println("Match: " + mat.group());
    }      
  }
}