Java Eclipse Regex Multiline Search

Question

We recently converted a large project from Swing to JavaFX. A conversion program was written to automate some of this process which saved a lot of time, but also left us with some issues. One of which is we have some Alerts that never have showAndWait() called. I was hoping to put a Regex together to find all instances in our project that meet the following criteria:

Starts with new Alert(

End with ");

And potentially contains 0 or multiple line feeds along with any characters in between the parenthesis.

I was able to come up with this: new Alert$*.*\R*.*\"$\;

But it seems to also include results that end with the showAndWait() call as well.

Examples:

new Alert(AlertType.INFORMATION, "This alert should not be matched").showAndWait();

new Alert(AlertType.INFORMATION, "This alert should be matched");

Thanks

can you provide an example of a wrongly-matched Alert? – dcsohl Nov 12 '15 at 18:38 — dcsohl, Nov 12 '15 at 18:38
Added to the question. Thank you. – Tommo Nov 12 '15 at 20:10 — Tommo, Nov 12 '15 at 20:10

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 04 '16 at 09:40

You may use a tempered greedy token solution:

\bnew\s+Alert\((?:(?!\.showAndWait\(\);\s*$)[\s\S])*"\);

See the regex demo and a screenshot below:

Pattern details:

\bnew - a whole word new
\s+ - 1 or more whitespaces
Alert\( - a sequence of literal chars Alert(
(?:(?!\.showAndWait;\s*$)[\s\S])* - the tempered greedy token matching any char ([\s\S]) that is not the starting char of a .showAndWait(); + zero or more whitespaces+end of line sequence
"\); - a sequence of literal chars ");

To understand what a [*tempered greedy token*](http://stackoverflow.com/a/37343088/3832970) is see my other answer. — Wiktor Stribiżew, Nov 04 '16 at 10:09

Java Eclipse Regex Multiline Search

1 Answers1