Matching against a regular expression in Scala

Question

I fairly frequently match strings against regular expressions. In Java:

java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(\"\\w+\").matcher(\"this_is\").matches

Ouch. Scala has

Answer 1

I usually use

val regex = "...".r
if (regex.findFirstIn(text).isDefined) ...

but I think that is pretty awkward.