Question

How do I test a string to see if it contains any of the strings from an array?

Instead of using

if (string.contains(item1) || string.contains(item2) || string.contains(item3))

Answer 1

EDIT: Here is an update using the Java 8 Streaming API. So much cleaner. Can still be combined with regular expressions too.

public static boolean stringContainsItemFromList(String inputStr, String[] items) {
    return Arrays.stream(items).anyMatch(inputStr::contains);
}

Also, if we change the input type to a List instead of an array we can use items.stream().anyMatch(inputStr::contains).

You can also use .filter(inputStr::contains).findAny() if you wish to return the matching string.

Important: the above code can be done using parallelStream() but most of the time this will actually hinder performance. See this question for more details on parallel streaming.

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Original slightly dated answer:

Here is a (VERY BASIC) static method. Note that it is case sensitive on the comparison strings. A primitive way to make it case insensitive would be to call toLowerCase() or toUpperCase() on both the input and test strings.

If you need to do anything more complicated than this, I would recommend looking at the Pattern and Matcher classes and learning how to do some regular expressions. Once you understand those, you can use those classes or the String.matches() helper method.

public static boolean stringContainsItemFromList(String inputStr, String[] items)
{
    for(int i =0; i < items.length; i++)
    {
        if(inputStr.contains(items[i]))
        {
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}