CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javastringcountcharacter
Yash Krishnan
Yash Krishnan

Reputation: 2785

Find the number of characters till nth word in Java?

What is the easiest way to find the number of characters in a sentence before nth word ?

For eg. :

String sentence = "Mary Jane and Peter Parker are friends."
int trigger = 5; //"Parker"

Output would be

Character count = 20

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 140

Answers (3)

BhanuReddy
BhanuReddy

Reputation: 94

public int getNumberOfCharacters(int nthWord){
    String sentence = "Mary Jane and Peter Parker are friends.";

    String[] wordArray = sentence.split(" ");
    int count = 0;
    for(int i=0; i<=nthWord-2 ; i++){
        count = count + wordArray[i].length();
    }

    return count + (nthWord-1);

}`

try this it should work

Upvotes: 1

dambros
dambros

Reputation: 4392

Using regex can be done like this:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    String sentence = "Mary Jane and Peter Parker are friends.";
    int trigger = 5;

    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(String.format("(?:\\S+\\s+){%d}(\\S+)", trigger - 1));
    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(sentence);
    matcher.find();
    System.out.println(matcher.group().lastIndexOf(" ") + 1);
}

I am going through all the trouble of finding the exact work instead of simply indexOf("Parker") because of possible duplicates.

The regex will match N words without capturing and capture the N+1 word. In your case it will match all previous words up to the one you want and capture the next one.

Upvotes: 0

Tunaki
Tunaki

Reputation: 137084

Easiest way would just be to loop around the characters in the String and count the number of white-spaces.

The following increments a length variable for every character. When a white-space is encountered, we decrement the number of remaining white-spaces to read, and when that number reaches 1, it means we hit the wanted word, so we break out of the loop.

public static void main(String[] args) {
    String sentence = "Mary Jane and Peter Parker are friends.";
    int trigger = 5; //"Parker"

    int length = 0;
    for (char c : sentence.toCharArray()) {
        if (trigger == 1) break;
        if (c == ' ') trigger--;
        length++;
    }
    System.out.println(length); // prints 20
}

Upvotes: 1

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