Java: String.contains matches exact word

Question

In Java

String term = "search engines" String subterm_1 = "engine" String subterm_2 = "engines" 

If I do term.contains(subterm_1) it returns true. I don't want that. I want the subterm to exactly match one of the words in term

Therefore something like term.contains(subterm_1) returns false and term.contains(subterm_2) returns true

Answer 1

\b Matches a word boundary where a word character is [a-zA-Z0-9_].

This should work for you, and you could easily reuse this method.

public class testMatcher { public static void main(String[] args){      String source1="search engines";     String source2="search engine";     String subterm_1 = "engines";     String subterm_2 = "engine";      System.out.println(isContain(source1,subterm_1));     System.out.println(isContain(source2,subterm_1));     System.out.println(isContain(source1,subterm_2));     System.out.println(isContain(source2,subterm_2));  }      private static boolean isContain(String source, String subItem){          String pattern = "\\b"+subItem+"\\b";          Pattern p=Pattern.compile(pattern);          Matcher m=p.matcher(source);          return m.find();     }  } 

Output:

true false false true