CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javastring
Tazo
Tazo

Reputation: 197

Find exact word in a sentence using Java

I am writing a code to spot country names in the text. I am using a dictionary with names of countries say India, America, Sri Lanka, .... I am currently using text.contains(key) with key from the dictionary. However, this returns true even for a string like Indiana. I tried putting the words of the sentence in an array and then doing the contains, similar approach can be considered with equals but they are really slow. Is there any other faster way you could think of?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 11177

Answers (3)

Arun P Johny
Arun P Johny

Reputation: 388316

Try to use word boundary class \b

s.matches(".*\\b" + key + "\\b.*")

Upvotes: 9

Navin
Navin

Reputation: 4107

Maybe you should be using some text processing library.

Here is a regex solution:

import java.util.regex.*;
import static java.lang.System.*;
public class SO {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String[] dict={"india","america"};
        String patStr=".*\\b(" + combine(dict,"|") + ")\\b.*";
        out.println("pattern: "+patStr+"\n");
        Pattern pat=Pattern.compile(patStr);

        String input1="hello world india indiana";
        out.println(input1+"\t"+pat.matcher(input1).matches());

        String input2="hello world america americana";
        out.println(input2+"\t"+pat.matcher(input2).matches());

        String input3="hello world indiana amercana";
        out.println(input3+"\t"+pat.matcher(input3).matches());
    }
    static String combine(String[] s, String glue){
      int k=s.length;
      if (k==0) return null;
      StringBuilder out=new StringBuilder();
      out.append(s[0]);
      for (int x=1;x<k;++x)
        out.append(glue).append(s[x]);
      return out.toString();
    }
}

Output:

pattern: .*\b(india|america)\b.*

hello world india indiana       true
hello world america americana   true
hello world indiana amercana    false

Upvotes: 1

Pradeep Pati
Pradeep Pati

Reputation: 5919

contains() should have worked. You can also try String.indexOf(String). If it returns anything other than -1, that query string exists in the said String, otherwise not.

Upvotes: 0

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