Parsing with regular expressions

Question

Hi
I'm developing an application that is trying to parse a text in a text file. It's looking for strings like
" 0551 TIMERHIN, S.L. "
Then I think I could lok with matches method for a string with many white chars followed by 4 numbers...
I did
line.matches("^\\s+[0-9]{4}")
but it didn't work...
Any help will be appreciated.
<jl>

Answer 1

The String.matches tries to match the regular express against the whole string.
You regex pattern "^\\s+[0-9]{4}" will match
"                          0551"but not
"                          0551 TIMERHIN, S.L. "You can do it using this code:
import java.sql.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.regex.*;
import java.util.*;
public class RegExTest {
public static void main (String args[]) {
   Pattern pat = null;
   Matcher m = null;
   String patternToMatch = "^\\s+[0-9]{4}";
   pat = Pattern.compile(patternToMatch);
   System.out.println("Pattern to match = " + patternToMatch);
   String line = "                          0551 TIMERHIN, S.L. ";
   m = pat.matcher(line);
   if (m.find()) { System.out.println("Line matched"); }
} // end main
} //End Class Test