pattern in java

Question

i need to write a code in java where it matches a string taken as input with a pattern .
The pattern may start with ". " or "H ".
After encoutering the first H it should be followed by any number of times "." and then "T".
thus the following patterns are valid patterns
.........H.......T......H......T
H.......T.....H......T.....
......HT......H....T...
.....H......TH......T
i want to write the code for pattern i.e.
string pattern= ???
plz help.

Answer 1

you may be looking for regular expressions. for your particular question, "[\.H]\.*T" could be the one you are after.

Answer 2

@Venkatesh Pitta thanks for ur answer.it helped me a lot to reach the final answer. But can u plz let me why u put \.H under the third bracket.I think it would work without that also.and i think it made a slight mistake in your wonderful answer it should be [\\.H]\\.*T.

Answer 3

@NIKHIL MURARKA a . by itself stands for any character. So it has to be escaped with a \. Glad to be of help. I wrote the answer before putting it through the compiler, so mistakes are likely.