I had assumed the maximum was 9 but after some experimentation I know it is not. The javadocs for Pattern and Matcher to not list a maximum.
+3
A:
There's no explicit ceiling, so theoretically the max would be Integer.MAX_VALUE. Practically speaking, the max will vary according the resources available, but I'm sure it's a lot more than you'll ever need.
Alan Moore
2009-06-18 01:02:04