Question

I am having issues with regex always returning false even though
“http://developer.android.com/reference/java/util/regex/Pattern.html” states it shouldn’t.

I am entering all kinds of specials charaters “&$@R@,” and b/b2 are both returning false in the logcat. The string I am putting into the edit text even displays in logcat as the exact one I input. Anyone have an idea as to why it won’t match the alphanumeric characters?

Code:

    EditText et1 = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.editText1);
    String et1Text = et1.getText().toString();
    int et1Length = et1.getText().toString().length();
    EditText et2 = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.editText2);
    String et2Text = et2.getText().toString();
    int et2Length = et2.getText().toString().length();

    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\W");
    Log.d(TAG,et1Text);
    Matcher m = p.matcher(et1Text);
    boolean b = m.matches();
    if (b == true){
        Log.d(TAG,"True");
    }
    else {
        Log.d(TAG,"False");
    }
    Log.d(TAG,et2Text);
    Matcher m2 = p.matcher(et2Text);
    boolean b2 = m2.matches();
    if (b2 == true){
        Log.d(TAG,"True");
    }
    else {
        Log.d(TAG,"False");
    }

    if (et1Length < 4 | et1Length > 15 | et2Length < 4 | et2Length > 15){
        Log.d(TAG,"Length dialog");
        dialog(1);
    }

    if (b==true | b2==true){
        Log.d(TAG,"Special char dialog");
        dialog(1);
    }

Answer 1

Instead of matches() which tries to match the whole string to pattern you can use find() which just tries to find any occurrence of the pattern. Source