11. Mixing regular expression with text blocks

Regular expressions can be used with text blocks. Let’s consider a simple string, as follows:

String nameAndAddress
  = "Mark Janson;243 West Main St;Louisville;40202;USA";

So here we have a name (Mark Janson) and some details about his address, delimited by a semicolon (;). It is a common scenario to pass such strings through regular expressions and extract the information as named groups. In this example, we can consider five named groups as follows:

• name: should contain the person’s name (Mark Janson)
• address: should contain the person’s street information (243 West Main St)
• city: should contain the person’s city (Louisville)
• zip: should contain the city’s zip code (40202)
• country: should contain the country’s name (USA)

A regular expression that can match these named groups may look as follows:

(?<name>[ a-zA-Z]+);(?...