regarding regex syntax

[Marcus Deviln]

Let's say you have some regex metadata with a conversion character like d. What is the purpose of the digits or integers that we sometimes see directly preceding the conversion character?(example: "%*4d/d" )

[Henry Wong]

Marcus Deviln wrote:Let's say you have some regex metadata with a conversion character like d. What is the purpose of the digits or integers that we sometimes see directly preceding the conversion character?(example: "%*4d/d" )

Regex metadata? Conversion character? Can you first explain to us what you mean?

Henry

[David Newton]

That looks more like a printf formatter.

[Siddhesh Deodhar]

+ 1 with David. Marcus, can you post your problem/requirement in detail?

[Campbell Ritchie]

Look at the Formatter class or these sections in the Java™ Tutorials: 1 2 and 3. I can't seem to find the * character in Formatter, however. Are you sure about that?

[Joanne Neal]

Campbell Ritchie wrote:Look at the Formatter class or these sections in the Java™ Tutorials: 1 2 and 3. I can't seem to find the * character in Formatter, however. Are you sure about that?

Maybe it's not supported in Java, but in C, the '*' character allows you to specify the field width in the argument list

From the MS C++ docs

The second optional field of the format specification is the width specification. The width argument is a nonnegative decimal integer controlling the minimum number of characters printed.... If the width specification is an asterisk (*), an int argument from the argument list supplies the value.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Joanne Neal wrote: . . . Maybe it's not supported in Java, but in C, . . .

No, it's not supported in Java, but thank you, Joanne. I had never seen that, not in the little C I have written.