I never learned sed or awk. Or even Perl. But I'm pretty good with Java's regex, and I'm familiar with the new text formatting facilities in Java 5.So rather than tricking myself into learning sed and awk, I wrote my own stream processor that uses Java's regex and pattern syntax:jessewilson$ Rip.javaUsage: Rip [flags] <regex> <format> regex: a Java regular expression, with groups http://java.sun.c... you can (parenthesize) groups \s whitespace \S non-whitespace \w word characters \W ...

Part 17 in a Series.I really like the Java Collections API. So much so, that I use 'em when I'm doing work that isn't particularly collectioney. For example, I recently wrote a quick-n-dirty app that rewrote some files line-by-line. Instead of using a Reader as input, I used an Iterator<String>. The easiest way to create such an iterator is to load the entire file into memory first.Before: public Iterator<String> linesIterator(Reader reader) { BufferedReader buffered = ...

Part 16 in a Series.The traditional approach to unions is to first create a new Set, and then to addAll using each component set. You can use a similar approach to do differences and intersections.Before: private static final ImmutableSet<String> LEGAL_PARAMETERS; static { Set<String> tmp = new HashSet<String>(); tmp.addAll(REQUIRED_PARAMETERS); tmp.addAll(OPTIONAL_PARAMETERS); LEGAL_PARAMETERS = ImmutableSet.copyOf(tmp); } public void login(Map<String, String> params) { if (!LEGAL_PARAMETERS.containsAll(params.keySet())) { Set<String> unrecognized = new HashSet<String>(params.keySet()); unrecognized.removeAll(LEGAL_PARAMETERS); throw new IllegalArgumentException("Unrecognized parameters: " + unrecognized); ...

I do this really annoying thing when I'm hanging out with my wife. I correct her when she uses the "wrong" words...We're walking around town when we see something out of the ordinary - like a humongous fat dog or a friendly hobo or a police chase.Her: "That was random"Me: "It was unexpected. Nothing really random about it."Her: "Ohhkayyy programmer boy. It was random. Get over it.Our apartment is in a bit of a ghetto. ...

Nobody reads imports. Good IDEs do their best to pretend imports don't even exist - they'll hide 'em from you, and manage them for you. They'll even add imports on demand when you're writing new code.Suppose you create your own, say @Inject or @RequestScoped annotation. In the code, it's practically impossible to differentiate between this and a Guice-supplied annotation:package com.publicobject.pizza;import com.google.common.base.Preconditions;import com.google.common.collect.ImmutableSet;import com.google.inject.Injector;import com.google.inject.Provider;import com.publicobject.pizza.annotation.RequestScoped;import com.publicobject.pizza.annotation.Inject;import com.publicobject.pizza.geography.GeographyService;import com.publicobject.pizza.hr.EmployeeRoster;@RequestScopedpublic class PizzaStore { @Inject PizzaStore(GeographyService geography, EmployeeRoster ...

It's diminishingly rare that I get to write code that improves the internals of both Glazed Lists and Guice...Glazed Lists' BeanPropertyBeanProperty is a convenient utility class that can expose a JavaBeans getter/setter property as its own object. You give it a class (like Baz.class) and a property name (like "bar") and it gives you a full property object - you can use it to read and write the property. It even exposes the property's type:class ...

It's really tempting. As far as devices go, iPhone 3G is the best there is. It's a generation ahead of its competitors, and the gap is growing. The app store is great for both developers and for its users. But I'm not gonna get one:Amazon MP3. Lots of good songs with no 'deregister this computer' nonsense. But Amazon MP3 cannot compete with iTunes on Apple's platform—third party apps can't download while I surf the web. ...