Hello,

I have a very frustrating problem getting Javas regexes to run. I have
no idea what I'm doing wrong, since even the most trivial expressions
don't find any matches - even when I've tested and verified them in
other regex enabled tools like UltraEdit or so.

The simplest test I could think of is the following:

public static void main(String[] args)
{
    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile( ".*" );
    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher( "hello" );
    System.out.println( matcher.group());
}

which gives me:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.IllegalStateException: No match found
    at java.util.regex.Matcher.group(Unknown Source)
    at java.util.regex.Matcher.group(Unknown Source)
    at BinNavi.GraphNavigator.main(GraphNavigator.java:1688)

WTF?! I mean shouldn't .* match just about anything? Including the empty
string? Similarly, matching "hello" to "hello" doesn't work, "t" to
"t"... Am I using it wrong?

I'm running on Java Version 1.5.0 (Build 1.5.0_06-b05), jdk1.5.0, my
test environment is Eclipse.

I'd appreciate any hints, since I'm sure this is a stupid mistake on my
part.

regards,

    Sören Meyer-Eppler