regex

Filter the content of a file using regular expressions

This is an example of how to filter the content of a file using regular expressions. Filtering the content of a file using regular expressions implies that you should:

  • Compile a given String regular expression to a Pattern, using compile(string regex) API method of Pattern.
  • Create a new FileInputStream with a given String path by opening a connection to a file.
  • Get the FileChannel object associated with the FileInputStream, with getChannel() API method of FileInputStream.
  • Create a ByteBuffer, using map(MapMode mode, long position, long size) API method of FileChannel that maps a region of this channel’s file directly into memory.
  • Create a CharBuffer, using forName(String charsetName) API method of Charset, newDecoder() API method of Charset and then decode(ByteBuffer in) API method of CharBuffer to decode the remaining content of a single input byte buffer into a newly-allocated character buffer.
  • Use matcher(CharSequence input) API method of Pattern to get a matcher that will match the given char buffer against this pattern.
  • Use find() and match() API methods of Matcher to get the matches of the the buffer with the pattern.

Let’s take a look at the code snippet that follows:

package com.javacodegeeks.snippets.core;

import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.nio.ByteBuffer;
import java.nio.CharBuffer;
import java.nio.channels.FileChannel;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class Main {
  public static void main(String[] argv) throws Exception {
    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("pattern");
    FileInputStream input = new FileInputStream("file.txt");
    FileChannel channel = input.getChannel();

    ByteBuffer bbuf = channel.map(FileChannel.MapMode.READ_ONLY, 0, (int) channel.size());
    CharBuffer cbuf = Charset.forName("8859_1").newDecoder().decode(bbuf);

    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(cbuf);
    while (matcher.find()) {

String match = matcher.group();

System.out.println(match);
    }
  }
}

 
This was an example of how to filter the content of a file using regular expressions in Java.

Ilias Tsagklis

Ilias is a software developer turned online entrepreneur. He is co-founder and Executive Editor at Java Code Geeks.
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