36. Regular Expression Operators

The earlier tutorial on Regular Expressions covered regular expression (pattern) variables and described the find and match methods. These operators are similar to these methods but return true or false if the pattern is found in (find) or matches (match) the first operand (a string).

For these operations, the left-hand operand must be a string and the right-hand operand a regular expression pattern.

Find (=~)

Returns true if the string on the left-side contains the pattern on the right of the operator.

def regex = ~/:[0-9]+/
def httpUrl1 = 'http://www.example.com:8080/'
def httpUrl2 = 'http://www.example.com/'

assert httpUrl1 =~ regex
assert ! (httpUrl2 =~ regex)

Match (==~)

Returns true if the string on the left-side matches (completely) the pattern provided on the right of the operator

def regex = ~/https?:\/\/.*/

def httpUrl = 'http://www.example.com/'
def ftpUrl = 'ftp://ftp.example.com/'

assert httpUrl ==~ regex
assert ! (ftpUrl ==~ regex)