Specific Regex Pattern

Question

I wish to take a string input from the user and extract words or numbers like so:

String problem = "I'm lo#o@king t%o ext!r$act a^ll 6 su*bs(tr]i{ngs.";

String[] solve = {"I'm", "looking", "to", "extract", "all", "6", "substrings"};

Basically, I want to extract numbers and words with complete disregard to punctuation except apostrophes. I know how to get words and strings but I can't seem to figure out this tricky part.

Avinash Raj · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-25 02:02:54Z

1

You could do like the below.

String s = "I'm lo#o@king t%o ext!r$act a^ll 6 su*bs(tr]i{ngs.";
String parts[] = s.replaceAll("[^\\s\\w']|(?<!\\b)'|'(?!\\b)", "").split("\\s+");
System.out.println(Arrays.toString(parts));

Output:

[I'm, looking, to, extract, all, 6, substrings]

Explanation:

[^\\s\\w'] matches any character but not of space or single quote or word character.
(?<!\\b)'(?!\\b) matches the ' symbol only if it's not preceded and not followed by a word character.
replaceAll function replaces all the matched characters with an empty string.
Finally we do splitting on the resultant string according to one or more space characters.

edited Feb 25, 2015 at 2:02

answered Feb 25, 2015 at 1:51

Avinash Raj

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9 Comments

Malik Brahimi Over a year ago

This is just what I need! But is there a simpler pattern?

Malik Brahimi Over a year ago

Is the 6 considered a word character? I don't see a integer regex.

Avinash Raj Over a year ago

yep, it;'s a string. [^\\w] matches any character but not of a word character that is A-Z,a-z,0-9,_ . It really needs replacing and then splitting. I think there is no shorter regex than this.

Malik Brahimi Over a year ago

This is just the same without double slashes. Honestly, I don't understand regex escapes in any language. I know I've seen you around in Python a lot, and I have difficulty differentiating regex as a raw string as opposed to a literal string.

Avinash Raj Over a year ago

@MalikBrahimi you need to escape the backslash one more time in java. That's all.

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