> If Java would provide native support for regular expressions I > would be the > happiest developer ever -- or at least as happy as the Perl > mongers are now. I'm not so sure I'd be happy about native support for regular expressions in a general purpose programming language such as Java. I think that sort of thing belongs in the speciality/scripting/4GL language arena. If you need to do language parsing in Java you can always use a compiler construction tool such as JavaCC. Additionally, if the parsing task is complex enough, you can do a lot more powerful things and produce higher quality code with a compiler construction tool than with Perl's regular expressions. I'm not a fan of hand written language parsers. They're fine for simple tasks, but don't scale well to more complex problems. However, I do agree that for simple tasks, Perl's regular expressions are awfully handy. For those not familiar with compiler construction tools, they are generally code generators that given a grammer description produce code that contains a parser for the given grammer. The produced parsers are often split into two parts: a lexical analyzer and a parser. The lexical analyzer splits the input stream into tokens and the parser interprets the organization of the tokens. For example, if parsing the english language the lexical analyzer would identify nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and the parser would interpret the meaning of sentences, paragraphs, etc. It is interesting to note that Perl regular expressions provide support only for lexical analyzation; not parsing. The parser has to be hand written in Perl. Besides JavaCC, there is lex/yacc, flex/bison, PCCTS, and probably many more. Mike