How to pattern match using regular expression in Scala?

Question

You can do this because regular expressions define extractors but you need to define the regex pattern first. I don't have access to a Scala REPL to test this but something like this should work.

val Pattern = "([a-cA-C])".r
word.firstLetter match {
   case Pattern(c) => c bound to capture group here
   case _ =>
}

Since version 2.10, one can use Scala's string interpolation feature:

implicit class RegexOps(sc: StringContext) {
  def r = new util.matching.Regex(sc.parts.mkString, sc.parts.tail.map(_ => "x"): _*)
}

scala> "123" match { case r"\d+" => true case _ => false }
res34: Boolean = true

Even better one can bind regular expression groups:

scala> "123" match { case r"(\d+)$d" => d.toInt case _ => 0 }
res36: Int = 123

scala> "10+15" match { case r"(\d\d)${first}\+(\d\d)${second}" => first.toInt+second.toInt case _ => 0 }
res38: Int = 25

It is also possible to set more detailed binding mechanisms:

scala> object Doubler { def unapply(s: String) = Some(s.toInt*2) }
defined module Doubler

scala> "10" match { case r"(\d\d)${Doubler(d)}" => d case _ => 0 }
res40: Int = 20

scala> object isPositive { def unapply(s: String) = s.toInt >= 0 }
defined module isPositive

scala> "10" match { case r"(\d\d)${d @ isPositive()}" => d.toInt case _ => 0 }
res56: Int = 10

An impressive example on what's possible with Dynamic is shown in the blog post Introduction to Type Dynamic:

object T {

  class RegexpExtractor(params: List[String]) {
    def unapplySeq(str: String) =
      params.headOption flatMap (_.r unapplySeq str)
  }

  class StartsWithExtractor(params: List[String]) {
    def unapply(str: String) =
      params.headOption filter (str startsWith _) map (_ => str)
  }

  class MapExtractor(keys: List[String]) {
    def unapplySeq[T](map: Map[String, T]) =
      Some(keys.map(map get _))
  }

  import scala.language.dynamics

  class ExtractorParams(params: List[String]) extends Dynamic {
    val Map = new MapExtractor(params)
    val StartsWith = new StartsWithExtractor(params)
    val Regexp = new RegexpExtractor(params)

    def selectDynamic(name: String) =
      new ExtractorParams(params :+ name)
  }

  object p extends ExtractorParams(Nil)

  Map("firstName" -> "John", "lastName" -> "Doe") match {
    case p.firstName.lastName.Map(
          Some(p.Jo.StartsWith(fn)),
          Some(p.`.*(\\w)$`.Regexp(lastChar))) =>
      println(s"Match! $fn ...$lastChar")
    case _ => println("nope")
  }
}

As delnan pointed out, the match keyword in Scala has nothing to do with regexes. To find out whether a string matches a regex, you can use the String.matches method. To find out whether a string starts with an a, b or c in lower or upper case, the regex would look like this:

word.matches("[a-cA-C].*")

You can read this regex as "one of the characters a, b, c, A, B or C followed by anything" (. means "any character" and * means "zero or more times", so ".*" is any string).

To expand a little on Andrew's answer: The fact that regular expressions define extractors can be used to decompose the substrings matched by the regex very nicely using Scala's pattern matching, e.g.:

val Process = """([a-cA-C])([^\s]+)""".r // define first, rest is non-space
for (p <- Process findAllIn "aha bah Cah dah") p match {
  case Process("b", _) => println("first: 'a', some rest")
  case Process(_, rest) => println("some first, rest: " + rest)
  // etc.
}

String.matches is the way to do pattern matching in the regex sense.

But as a handy aside, word.firstLetter in real Scala code looks like:

word(0)

Scala treats Strings as a sequence of Char's, so if for some reason you wanted to explicitly get the first character of the String and match it, you could use something like this:

"Cat"(0).toString.matches("[a-cA-C]")
res10: Boolean = true

I'm not proposing this as the general way to do regex pattern matching, but it's in line with your proposed approach to first find the first character of a String and then match it against a regex.

EDIT: To be clear, the way I would do this is, as others have said:

"Cat".matches("^[a-cA-C].*")
res14: Boolean = true

Just wanted to show an example as close as possible to your initial pseudocode. Cheers!

Note that the approach from @AndrewMyers's answer matches the entire string to the regular expression, with the effect of anchoring the regular expression at both ends of the string using ^ and $. Example:

scala> val MY_RE = "(foo|bar).*".r
MY_RE: scala.util.matching.Regex = (foo|bar).*

scala> val result = "foo123" match { case MY_RE(m) => m; case _ => "No match" }
result: String = foo

scala> val result = "baz123" match { case MY_RE(m) => m; case _ => "No match" }
result: String = No match

scala> val result = "abcfoo123" match { case MY_RE(m) => m; case _ => "No match" }
result: String = No match

And with no .* at the end:

scala> val MY_RE2 = "(foo|bar)".r
MY_RE2: scala.util.matching.Regex = (foo|bar)

scala> val result = "foo123" match { case MY_RE2(m) => m; case _ => "No match" }
result: String = No match

First we should know that regular expression can separately be used. Here is an example:

import scala.util.matching.Regex
val pattern = "Scala".r // <=> val pattern = new Regex("Scala")
val str = "Scala is very cool"
val result = pattern findFirstIn str
result match {
  case Some(v) => println(v)
  case _ =>
} // output: Scala

Second we should notice that combining regular expression with pattern matching would be very powerful. Here is a simple example.

val date = """(\d\d\d\d)-(\d\d)-(\d\d)""".r
"2014-11-20" match {
  case date(year, month, day) => "hello"
} // output: hello

In fact, regular expression itself is already very powerful; the only thing we need to do is to make it more powerful by Scala. Here are more examples in Scala Document: http://www.scala-lang.org/files/archive/api/current/index.html#scala.util.matching.Regex