Simple java regex not matching

Question

my regex returning false, cant understand why.

Pattern patt = Pattern.compile("\\d+");
patt.matcher("a 18c1").matches(); //returning false

Also I tried [0-9]+ , (\\\\d+) , ([0-9]+) , they didnt work too.. Can you help me? Thanks

Answer 1

This is because you use .matches() . What you want is .find() .

.matches() is a misnomer; it will try and match against the entire input . Regex matching is done using .find() :

final Matcher matcher = patt.matcher("a 18c1");
if (matcher.find())
    System.out.println(matcher.group());