Can we use regular expressions in web.xml URL patterns?

Question

I am writing a filter to do a specific task but I am unable to set a specific url pattern to my filter. My filter mapping is as follows:

Answer 1

The previous responses are correct in that a url-pattern can only begin or end with a wild-card character, and thus the true power of regex cannot be used.

However, I've solved this issue on previous projects by creating a simple default filter that intercepts all requests and the filter contains regex to determine whether further logic should be applied. I found that there was little to no performance degradation with this approach.

Below is a simple example that could be enhanced by moving the regex pattern to a filter attribute.

Filter configuration within the web.xml:

    SampleFilter
    org.test.SampleFilter


    SampleFilter
    SampleServlet


    SampleServlet
    /*

Basic filter implementation that could use any regex pattern (sorry, uses Spring's OncePerRequestFilter parent class):

public class SampleFilter extends OncePerRequestFilter {

    @Override
    final protected void doFilterInternal(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response, FilterChain filterChain) throws ServletException, IOException {
        if (applyLogic(request)) {
            //Execute desired logic;
        }

        filterChain.doFilter(request, response);
    }

    protected boolean applyLogic(HttpServletRequest request) {
        String path = StringUtils.removeStart(request.getRequestURI(), request.getContextPath());

        return PatternMatchUtils.simpleMatch(new String[] { "/login" }, path);
    }
}