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Full pattern matching

You're preparing a historical analysis of game releases, but your database contains dates in mixed formats. Before you can analyze release timing patterns, you need to identify which dates need reformatting to match your standard MM/DD/YYYY format. You've extracted dates from the video game dataset below.

Game Platform Release date Quantity (millions of units)
Wii Sports Wii 11/19/2006 41.49
Super Mario Bros. NES 11/13/1985 29.08
Mario Kart Wii Wii 4/10/2008 15.85

This exercise is part of the course

Cleaning Data in Java

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Exercise instructions

  • Define a regex pattern to match the date format d/MM/yyyy.
  • Check if the entire date string matches datePattern.

Hands-on interactive exercise

Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.

import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;

public class PatternValidation {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        List dates = Arrays.asList("11/19/2006", "11/13/1985", "4/10/2008", "2008-04-10");
        // Define a regex pattern to match the date format
        Pattern datePattern = ____.____("\\d{1,2}/\\d{1,2}/\\d{4}");

        for (String date : dates) {
            // Check if entire date string matches datePattern
            boolean isValid = datePattern.____(date).____();
            System.out.println(date + " is valid: " + isValid);
        }
    }
}
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