CODEWITHSUNDEEP
java
jeispyun
jeispyun

Reputation: 137

JAVA - how to ignore all words that contains non-alphabetical letters

My program reads txt file with Scanner and save each and every words in it in ArrayList, word by word, by using Scanner.next(). In here, any words that contains non-alphabetical letters should be ignored, meaning should not be counted as word at all(not replacing them). For example: "U2", "data-based", or "hello!" should not be counted at all.

I could make it to read all words and save it to ArrayList, but I am stuck with ignoring words containing non-letter element.

This is my partial code:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    ArrayList<Word> wordList = new ArrayList<Word>();
    int wordCount = 0;
    Scanner input;

    try {
        System.out.println("Enter the file name with extension: ");
        input = new Scanner(System.in);
        File file = new File(input.nextLine());
        input.close();
        input = new Scanner(file);
        while(input.hasNext())
        {
            Word w = new Word(input.next().toLowerCase()); //should be case-insensitive
            if(!wordList.contains(w)) //equals method overriden in Word class
            wordList.add(w);
            else 
            {
                wordList.get(wordList.indexOf(w)).addCount();
            }
            wordCount++;
        }
        input.close();

Word class is defined by me and is just a simple class with attributes of word(String) and count(int). equals() method was defined.

I think regex would be the solution for this, but since I am not sure how to define "non-alphabetical" in regex(I have no knowledge of regex) I can't define solid range..

Any help would be appreciated!

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1577

Answers (2)

Nicholas K
Nicholas K

Reputation: 15423

You can use the regex ^[a-zA-Z]*$ to match only alphabets. Use this before adding to your ArrayList.

Now you can use the .matches() of the String class to check if it contains only alphabets. An eg :

String str = "asd";
if (str.matches(^[a-zA-Z]*$)) {
   // only alphabets
} else {
   // something else
}

Upvotes: 3

Sandeepa
Sandeepa

Reputation: 3755

You can use this to check if your String contains letters only. It will return true if it only contains letters and false if it contains other characters

Pattern.matches("[a-zA-Z]+", yourString)

You will have to import

import java.util.regex.Pattern;

Upvotes: 2

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