About reb4j
The purpose of reb4j is to provide a pure Java wrapper around the regular expression syntax provided by the JRE's java.util.regex.Pattern class.
reb4j provides the following benefits over writing regular expressions directly:
- The reb4j API guarantees proper expression syntax. If the Java code compiles, the regular expression will compile at runtime. In other words, it is not necessary to deal with PatternSyntaxExceptions. You will know right away if there is a syntax error in your regular expression, rather than having to wait until runtime to find out.
- The reb4j API enables composition of subexpressions. Complex expressions can be broken into manageable pieces, each of which can be independently tested and reused.
- Patterns built using reb4j are inherently self-documenting (at least, moreso than regular expression syntax). Since composition is supported, each subexpression can be given a meaningful name that describes what it represents.
- Since reb4j hides regular expression syntax from the developer, there is no need to memorize (or repeatedly look up) what symbols represent which expression constructs, nor is it necessary to "double-escape" strings (i.e., escaped once to override how the pattern compiler interprets special characters, and escaped again to fit into Java string literals).
Of course, this comes at the cost of a modest performance penalty at startup as reb4j builds strings to pass into the pattern compiler, but the time required for this processing is dwarfed by the time spent by the compiler itself and should not be noticeable.
