How to check whether a String fully matches a Regex in Scala?

regex, scala

Solution

Answering my own question I'll use the "pimp my library pattern"

object RegexUtils {
  implicit class RichRegex(val underlying: Regex) extends AnyVal {
    def matches(s: String) = underlying.pattern.matcher(s).matches
  }
}

and use it like this

import RegexUtils._
val Digit = """\d""".r
if (Digit matches "5") println("match")
else println("no match")

unless someone comes up with a better (standard) solution.

Notes

I didn't pimp `String` to limit the scope of potential side effects.

`unapplySeq` does not read very well in that context.

Problem

Assume I have a Regex pattern I want to match many Strings to. ``` val Digit = """\d""".r ``` I just want to check whether a given String fully matches the Regex. What is a good and idiomatic way to do this in Scala? I know that I can pattern match on Regexes, but this is syntactically not very pleasing in this case, because I have no groups to extract: ``` scala> "5" match { case Digit() => true case _ => false } res4: Boolean = true ``` Or I could fall back to the underlying Java pattern: ``` scala> Digit.pattern.matcher("5").matches res6: Boolean = true ``` which is not elegant, either. Is there a better solution?

Original source