Ikai Lan says

I’ve been trying to use Scala more and more so I can gain some experience and exposure to it. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a Scala log parser for Ruby on Rails. It is terribly newbie-ish – the classes are mutable and it’s disorganized. It’s a mess. Jorge Ortiz from the Scala mailing list was kind enough to rewrite it in a more Scala style. It completely blew my mind how terse Scala can become when written correctly.

It bothered me, however, dealing with regular expressions the way that I did. The Java interface is pretty clumsy and nowhere near as clean as regular expression pattern extraction in Perl or Ruby.

As it turns out, it’s surprisingly easy to extract text using Regular Expressions in Scala. Throw away Pattern.compile! Check out this hotness below:

First, let’s import Scala’s regex package:

import scala.util.matching.Regex

Now we declare a regular expression to match against. We can do this one of two ways:

val LogEntry = new Regex("""Completed in (\d+)ms \(View: (\d+), DB: (\d+)\) \| (\d+) OK \[http://app.domain.com(.*)\?.*""")

I use triple quotes here to signify that I am creating a raw string. A raw string means that I do not need to escape characters like the \ character. If I didn't do this, I'd be forced to use strings like "\\d+". Believe it or not, that extra slash throws me off. Just goes to show that I have written way too many parsers.

Alternatively, I can declare a new Regex by doing this:

val LogEntry = """Completed in (\d+)ms \(View: (\d+), DB: (\d+)\) \| (\d+) OK \[http://app.domain.com(.*)\?.*""".r

Strings have a method called "r", which will convert it to a Regex object. I'm not sold on this syntax at the moment, since it doesn't play well with eyeball scans, but I'm putting it here for those folks that absolutely need to save characters.

There's nothing really special here yet. The next step is REALLY cool:

val line = "Completed in 100ms (View: 25, DB: 75) | 200 OK [http://app.domain.com?params=here]"

scala> val LogEntry(totalTime, viewTime, dbTime, responseCode, uri) = line
totalTime: String = 100
viewTime: String = 25
dbTime: String = 75
responseCode: String = 200
uri: String =

The local variables totalTime, viewTime, dbTime, responseCode and uri are now bound to the values we want to extract from the original line! The regular expression value defines an unapplySeq method. I’m not quite good enough at Scala to tell you in any definite terms what that means, except that you can use the code in a pattern match:

line match {
case LogEntry(totalTime, viewTime, dbTime, responseCode, uri) => {
/* Process the data */
// do something with totalTime.toInt
// do something with viewTime.toInt
// etc ...
}
case _ => // Do nothing
}

Because you can use a pattern match, and patterns will be be matched in the order of definition, this means that you can create several regular expressions representing lines you want to extract, then process them easily in using pattern matching.

Pretty powerful stuff. What would really make my day would be if someone knew how I could extract the values totalTime, viewTime, and dbTime as integers and not have to do a conversion – I’m already matching with \d+. Ideas?