Question

I am trying to make a regex in Java which could crudely be used to match certain street names. I want to make it so that given the following string:

Then someone decided to go to the high street for a drink

The term “high street” would be matched. So that is the preceeding word and the word “street” to get the street name. I have tried something like this:

Pattern.compile("(\\w+\\s*(road|street|square|rd|st|sq)\\W+)");

But this is failing, it seems that Java wants to match the whole sentence, but I am just interested in a few words. I have tried a few reluctant quantifiers as well, but nothing seems to work.

Any help/suggestions will be much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Make sure you use Matcher.find and not Matcher.matches.

This works fine on my machine:

String s = "Then someone decided to go to the high street for a drink";

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(\\w+\\s*(road|street|square|rd|st|sq)\\W+)");

Matcher m = p.matcher(s);

System.out.println(m.find());   // prints true
System.out.println(m.group());  // prints "high street"

---

You could also simplify the expression a little:

\w+\s*(road|street|square|rd|st|sq)\W

or

\w+\s*(r(oa)?d|st(reet)?|sq(uare)?)\W

(gives the same output as above)