A general purpose text decoder that uses regular expresions.

That's an interesting addition.

Just wondering if you also have some unit tests for it ? It would be cool to add something like the TextLineEncoder/DecoderTest classes to check this regexp codec.

Thanks !

Thinking a bit more about the proposal :

As you know, you have no guarantee that a terminated message will be transmitted in one single block. What if the received bytes just get decoded and the regexp is partially matched ?

For instance using the LINE_TERM regexp, what if we receive \r\n in two messages ? I guess that you will match LINE_TERM twice, and potentially consider that you have two lines to deal with, when it's just an artefact, as the sender really wanted to terminate its message with a '\r\n'

This is where it gets tricky ...

Yeah I see what you are saying about that case but as the second matching message would begin with the terminator it would be filtered out. I should probably separate out the multi-character and single-character patterns for line feeds into separate constants. I'll try to write some unit tests as time permits this week.

any progress here ?

I don't think it would bring a lot of benefit.

First, most of the time the protocol is simple enough to use a TestLineDecoder.

Second, using a regexp does not fit well with the very nature of NIO communication : we may receive the data in smal chunks, though that would require more than one macth to be sure we get all what we need.