Convert String into an expression.

Hello,

Is there a way to take a String, for instance "4 * 5" from a JTextField and convert it into an expression where I will get a result? Thank you.

If it's only a simple math expression like what you showed above, it's pretty simple to roll out your own parsing algorithm. But if you deal with a more complex math expression, you are better off using JEP

Thanks a lot. Do you have any resources that you can point me to so that I can do this conversion?

Sorry, I just realized that JEP has been commercialized. Besides, the older version of JEP uses GPL license may not be suitable if you're doing any commercial project. Try to Google for any other free Java math expression libraries.

You will need to get a compiler book, eg Aho Sethi Lam and Ullman. That explains how strings can be parsed, and shows how to convert arithmetic to postfix. There are lots of tools available; you usually use a scanner (eg lex, flex, JFlex) and a parser eg yacc, ANTLR, CUP.

The problem is similar to the first stages in writing a compiler.

It's not necessary to write your own parser.

Java 6 has a scripting API, which you could use for this, as long as the expression is valid JavaScript (or any other supported scripting language). Example:
import javax.script.ScriptEngine; import javax.script.ScriptEngineManager; import javax.script.ScriptException; public class Main { public static void main(String[] args) { String expression = "4 * 5"; // Get JavaScript engine ScriptEngine engine = new ScriptEngineManager().getEngineByExtension("js"); try { // Evaluate the expression Object result = engine.eval(expression); System.out.println(expression + " = " + result); } catch (ScriptException e) { // Something went wrong e.printStackTrace(); } } }
If you are not using Java 6, have a look at BeanShell.

Thank you all very much. I will try them out.

Jesper,

That worked awesome! Thank you so much!

Hi!! The code works perfect.

However, I still have a question (I am new to Java).
What I want to do is simply get operands (with and without fractional part) and operators separated. Code below only gives me operands. For simplicity I am considering +,-,*,/ as the candidate operators. Off course you can give me a direct expression to use, but I would appreciate if you can give an Idea of the approach to build it. I am finally trying to solve expression (infix notation) given as a String. I think, constructing a tree with operator as Non-Leaf Nodes and operand as leaf nodes and then traversing the tree would help me (Not an issue now).

For eg.
input: 1.2*3+45-5/3+2
output: 1.2 * 3 + 45 - 5 / 3 + 2

import java.util.regex.Matcher; import java.util.regex.Pattern; import javax.swing.JOptionPane; public class RegexTest { public static void main(String[] args) { String string = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Expression"); Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("(\\d*(\\.?)\\d+)"); System.out.println(string); Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(string); System.out.println("Group Count: " + matcher.groupCount()); while (matcher.find()) { System.out.print(matcher.group() + " "); } } }

Thanks.