Question

I’m used to regular expressions from Perl. Does anybody know why this doesn’t work (eg. “yea” isn’t printed)?

if ("zip".matches("ip"))
  System.out.println("yea");

Thank you.

Answer 1

matches() is a complete match; the string has to match the pattern.

if ("zip".matches("zip"))
    System.out.println("yea");

So you could do:

if ("zip".matches(".*ip"))
  System.out.println("yea");

For partial matching you can use the complete regex classes and the find() method;

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("ip");
Matcher m = p.matcher("zip");
if (m.find())
    System.out.println("yea");