Java Scanner newline parsing with regex (Bug?)
- by SEK
I'm developing a syntax analyzer by hand in Java, and I'd like to use regex's to parse the various token types. The problem is that I'd also like to be able to accurately report the current line number, if the input doesn't conform to the syntax.
Long story short, I've run into a problem when I try to actually match a newline with the Scanner class. To be specific, when I try to match a newline with a pattern using the Scanner class, it fails. Almost always. But when I perform the same matching using a Matcher and the same source string, it retrieves the newline exactly as you'd expect it too. Is there a reason for this, that I can't seem to discover, or is this a bug, as I suspect?
FYI: I was unable to find a bug in the Sun database that describes this issue, so if it is a bug, it hasn't been reported.
Example Code:
Pattern newLinePattern = Pattern.compile("(\\r\\n?|\\n)", Pattern.MULTILINE);
String sourceString = "\r\n\n\r\r\n\n";
Scanner scan = new Scanner(sourceString);
scan.useDelimiter("");
int count = 0;
while (scan.hasNext(newLinePattern)) {
scan.next(newLinePattern);
count++;
}
System.out.println("found "+count+" newlines"); // finds 7 newlines
Matcher match = newLinePattern.matcher(sourceString);
count = 0;
while (match.find()) {
count++;
}
System.out.println("found "+count+" newlines"); // finds 5 newlines
