Description Daniel Herding 2016-07-06 11:00:28 EDT

I wanted to create an ECL procedure to match a regular expression and return the contents of a given match group. This is what I came up with:

proc "regex-group" [val text -input] [val regex] [val groupNumber] {
    with [invoke-static "de.dsa.base.bi.core" "java.util.regex.Pattern" compile $regex | invoke matcher $text] {
        invoke find
        invoke group $groupNumber
    }
}

Then I call something like:
regex-group "AB123BA" "\w+(\d+)\w+" 1

Unfortunately this doesn't work at runtime:
> Do not know how to box value of type 'java.util.regex.Matcher'

I haven't found a way to call find() and group(int) on the same Matcher object via ECL reflection.

It would be nice if RCPTT had a general-purpose mechanism to box arbitrary Java objects. The only thing I'd like to do with it is call "invoke" on it.