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

Question

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?

Answer 1

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.