Cannot get regular expression pattern match to work

[Tanya Ruttenberg]

Here is the code:

String x = "where";
String s = " select name from devices where";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("where");
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
boolean b = m.matches();

b comes out to false except when s and x are identical.

I thought I knew something about regular expressions, but clearly I am missing something basic.

Where am I going wrong? Thanks in advance. This is such a helpful website.

TDR

[Jeff Verdegan]

Tanya Ruttenberg wrote:Here is the code:

String x = "where";
String s = " select name from devices where";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("where");
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
boolean b = m.matches();

b comes out to false except when s and x are identical.

Correct. As explained in the docs.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/regex/Matcher.html#matches() says: "Attempts to match the entire region against the pattern."

So you can either do matches(".*where.*+") or you can look into other methods, such as find(), if I'm not mistaken.

Or, if your matching requirements are really just String literals, you can skip regex altogether and just use String.contains().