!Reinventing the wheel

While digging into the ways I might resolve the nested bracketing of expressions I did a bit of parallel homework and discovered that javax has functionality which can be leveraged to save a world of work here, the ScriptEngine interface. I played around with it for a while and came up with this example of how we might implement a calculator using the ScriptEngine.

import javax.script.ScriptEngine;
import javax.script.ScriptEngineManager;
import javax.script.ScriptException;

public class Evaluator {
private ScriptEngineManager sm = new ScriptEngineManager();
private ScriptEngine sEngine = sm.getEngineByName("js");

public double stringEval(String expr)
{
Object res = "";
        try {
           res = sEngine.eval(expr);
          } 
         catch(ScriptException se) {
            se.printStackTrace();
        }
        return Double.parseDouble( res.toString());
}

} 

Here’s how we might use it:

Evaluator evr = new Evaluator();
String sTest = "+1+9*(2 * 5)";
double dd = evr.stringEval(sTest);
System.out.println(dd);

Not reinventing the wheel here proves to be a big win. It runs fast and significantly reduces the amount of code which needs to be supported. Some useful and broader based information on using scripting can be found here.

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