Question

I currently have a regex pattern that matches a specific word, which includes arbitrary whitespace.

e.g. if the word was “the”, my pattern will match “t h e” as well as ” the”

My question is, is there any way to count and track the number of consecutive repeats?
I am looking to return the largest amount of consecutive repeats of the word.

e.g. if my string was “the quick brown fox thethe jumped thethethe over the…”

I would want my method to return 3, not 7. Counting the total number of occurrences is very straightforward:

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(t\\s*h\\s*e\\s*)");
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);

while(m.find()) {
    count++;
}

I would like to return the greatest number of consecutive repetitions.
Just curious if there is a way to do this with regex.

Answer 1

I believe I came up with a sensible solution:

// Possible values for n:
// (t\\s*h\\s*e\\s*){1}
// (t\\s*h\\s*e\\s*){2}
// (t\\s*h\\s*e\\s*){3}...
public int consecutiveThe(String s) {
    int n = 0;
    while(true) {
         String expression = "(t\\s*h\\s*e\\s*){" + n + "}";
         Pattern p = Pattern.compile(expression);
         Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
         if(!m.find()) {
            break;
         }
         n++;
    }
    return (n - 1);
}

The idea is to loop through consecutive values of n, checking if there is a regex match. As soon as we have a value of n that is unmatched, return the number that was most previously matched in the sequence.