Regular expressions... they are not regular! =)

Question

So,
I've been pulling my hair out with regular expressions. I'm sure there is a logical explanation to this, but i've read a bunch of explanations and i THOUGHT i understood this, but i don't. Here goes:
I have a string "2010PETE". I tried matching it to "\\d{1,}" (this is how i entered it in Java). This returns FALSE. HOWEVER, it seems to me the above should be TRUE because it says that a greedy quantifier with {1,} searches for the the preceding character AT LEAST N times, where in this case n=1, so i interpret this as "If a digit (\\d) is found at least once within the string, then this string matches the regular expression. This does NOT seem to be the case.
Can someone clear this up for me?

Answer 1

THANK YOU. i think that is what i was missing, the part about
"would only match if the input consisted of at least one digit, possibly multiple digits, and nothing else."
I read the documentation and some of it didn't seem to be clear on that point.
i'll play around with this and see how far i can get. if i still have questions i will post some code for sure, and try to get a nice, rounded set of examples.
thanks!
ONE OTHER QUESTION I JUST THOUGHT OF: does the .matches() method match expressions when some substring of the String matches, or does it have to match the entire String? So, if i have the String "123ABC", and i ask to match "1 or more letters" will it fail because there are non-letters in the String, but then pass if i add "1 or more letters AND 1 or more digits"? so, in the latter every character in the String is accounted for in the search, as opposed to the first. Is that correct, or are there ways to JUST match some substring in the String instead of the whole thing? i WILL make some examples too... but does that make sense?
Edited by: pedron on Jan 12, 2012 3:23 PM