Question

I hope this title makes sense – I need case-insensitive regex matching on BlackBerry 5.

I have a regular expression defined as:

    public static final String SMS_REG_EXP = "(?i)[(htp:/w\\.)]*cobiinteractive\\.com/[\\w|\\%]+";

It is intended to match “cobiinteractive.com/” followed by some text. The preceding (htp:w.) is just there because on my device I needed to override the internal link-recognition that the phone applies (shameless hack).

The app loads at start-up. The idea is that I want to pick up links to my site from sms & email, and process them with my app.

I add it to the PatternRepository using:

    PatternRepository.addPattern(
        ApplicationDescriptor.currentApplicationDescriptor(),
        GlobalConstants.SMS_REG_EXP,
        PatternRepository.PATTERN_TYPE_REGULAR_EXPRESSION,
        applicationMenu);

• On the os 4.5 / 4.7 simulators and on
  a Curve 8900 device (running 4.5),
  this works.
• On the os 5 simulators and the Bold
  9700 I tested, app fails to compile
  the pattern with an
  IllegalArgumentException(“unrecognized
  character after (?”).

I have also tried (naively) to set the pattern to “/rockstar/i” but that only matches the exact string – this is possibly the correct direction to take, but if so, I don’t know how to implement it on the BB.

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How would I modify my regex in order to pick up case insensitive patterns using the PatternRepository as above?

PS: would the “correct” way be to use the [Cc][Oo][Bb][Ii]2… etc pattern? This is ok for a short string, but I am hoping for a more general solution if possible?

Answer 1

Since nobody else has answered this question relating to the PatternRepository class, I will self-answer so I can close it.

One way to do this would be to use a pattern like: [Cc][Oo][Bb][Ii]2[Nn][Tt][Ee][Rr][Aa][Cc][Tt][Ii][Vv][Ee]… etc where for each letter in the string, you put 2 options. Fortunately my string is short.

This is not an elegant solution, but it works. Unfortunately I don’t know of a way to modify the string passed to PatternRepository and I think the crash when using the (?i) modifier is a bug in BB.