Check if string is a punctuation character

Question

Let's say I have a String array that contains some letters and punctuation

String letter[] = {"a","b","c",".","a"};

In letter[3] we have "."

How can I check if a string is a punctuation character? We know that there are many possible punctuation characters (,.?! etc.)

My progress so far:

for (int a = 0; a < letter.length; a++) {
    if (letter[a].equals(".")) { //===>> i'm confused in this line
        System.out.println ("it's punctuation");
    } else {
        System.out.println ("just letter");
    }
}

Answer 1

Here is one way to do it with regular expressions:

if (Pattern.matches("\\p{Punct}", str)) {
    ...
}

The \p{Punct} regular expression is a POSIX pattern representing a single punctuation character.

Answer 2

Depending on your needs, you could use either

Pattern.matches("\\p{Punct}", str)

or

Pattern.matches("\\p{IsPunctuation}", str)

The first pattern matches the following 32 characters: !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~

The second pattern matches a whopping 632 unicode characters, including, for example: «, », ¿, ¡, §, ¶, ‘, ’, “, ”, and ‽.

Interestingly, not all of the 32 characters matched by the first pattern are matched by the second. The second pattern does not match the following 9 characters: $, +, <, =, >, ^, `, |, and ~ (which the first pattern does match).

If you want to match for any character from either character set, you could do:

Pattern.matches("[\\p{Punct}\\p{IsPunctuation}]", str)