Java Buffered Reader detecting patterns in phrases

Question

I want my program to be able to read in a file of java code and be able to identify the different methods. Is this possible to do with a buffered reader or should I be doing something different? Since methods can return any type (String/void/int/etc) and can be of many different types of modifier (private/public etc) I don't see how I can identify them easily.

public returnType methodName(String s){

How can I get my program to read that in and automatically detect that it is of the same format as:

private Set<String> nextstates(int newInt)

Answer 1

You can use regular expressions to search the file for method definitions. You would just read in the file line by line using a BufferedReader for example and search in every line for matches with the regex. One possible regex is the one suggested in the following post by Georgios Gousios