Assume I have a Regex pattern I want to match many Strings to. val Digit = """\d""".r I just want to check whether a given String fully matches the Regex. What is a good and idiomatic way to do this in Scala? I know that I can pattern match on Regexes, but this is syntactically not very pleasing in this case, because I have no groups to extract: scala> "5" match { case Digit() => true case _ => false } res4: Boolean = true Or I could fall back to the underlying Java pattern: scala> Digit.pattern.matcher("5").matches res6: Boolean = true which is not elegant, either. Is there a better solution?