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How would I find if a whole word, i.e. "EU", exists within the String "I am in the EU.", while not also matching cases like "I am in Europe."?
Basically, I'd like some sort of regex for the word i.e. "EU" with non-alphabetical characters on either side.
525
You can use alternation to match a single regular expression out of several possible regular expressions. If you want to search for the literal text cat or dog, separate both options with a vertical bar or pipe symbol: cat|dog.
The word boundary \b matches positions where one side is a word character (usually a letter, digit or underscore—but see below for variations across engines) and the other side is not a word character (for instance, it may be the beginning of the string or a space character).
A word boundary, in most regex dialects, is a position between \w and \W (non-word char), or at the beginning or end of a string if it begins or ends (respectively) with a word character ( [0-9A-Za-z_] ). So, in the string "-12" , it would match before the 1 or after the 2. The dash is not a word character.
.*\bEU\b.*
public static void main(String[] args) {
String regex = ".*\\bEU\\b.*";
String text = "EU is an acronym for EUROPE";
//String text = "EULA should not match";
if(text.matches(regex)) {
System.out.println("It matches");
} else {
System.out.println("Doesn't match");
}
}
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