CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaregex
Bhavesh Kharwa
Bhavesh Kharwa

Reputation: 73

Match exact word using regex in java

I need a regular expression to match an exact word.

For example:

There is a string "draft guidance allerg Excellence" and I want to search allerg then I have written \ballerg\b. It gives me exact match. But when I pass string as "draft guidance 12=allerg Excellence" then it also return true, but this is wrong.

Which regular expression do I need to match only exact words?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 6185

Answers (2)

newfurniturey
newfurniturey

Reputation: 38456

The \b boundary would normally handle this situation, even in your case of "draft guidance 12=allerg Excellence"; however, you're saying that the = is part of the word (in normal English, this is not the case).

I'm assuming then that by "whole word", you mean a word that is surrounded by a space or normal sentence punctuation. In this case, a regex such as the following should work:

(?:^|[\s\.;\?\!,])allerg(?:$|[\s\.;\?\!,])

You can, obviously, add or remove characters as needed.

Regex Explained:

(?:                     # non-matching group
    ^                   # beginning of string
    | [\s\.;\?\!,]      # OR a space, period, and other misc. punctuation
)
allerg                  # string to match
(?:                     # non-matching group
    $                   # end of string
    | [\s\.;\?\!,]      # OR a space, period, and other misc. punctuation
)

Upvotes: 6

18bytes
18bytes

Reputation: 6029

If i understood the question correctly, you want to match a word "allerg" . A word is enclosed with whitespace characters and "=allerg" has the "=" character which you dont want to match.

To match the word "allerg" you can use the following regex:

\s+allerg\s+

Upvotes: -1

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