I have a Java method that looks for a word inside a phrase, and if it finds the word then it removes it from the phrase. The word and the phrase can be anything. They’re variant. Here is my code :
private String removeWord( String phrase, String word ) {
phrase = phrase.replaceAll( "(?i)" + word , "" );
return phrase;
}
The problem I have is that there is a phrase passed to this method :
The ancient Roman Empire was so vast, so mighty and so ambitious that it had a powerful effect on
nearly everything that it touched. Rome’s influence was so widespread that even today, the languages, cultures,
laws and governments of most Western nations still bear Rome’s mark.
And the word to find and remove from the text is “Roman Empire”, but it couldn’t delete it. After some investigation I found this was because the spaces in the phrase were not normal spaces. When I copied the phrase’s text in Notepad++ and searched for the same word, I couldn’t find it too !
See the attached screenshot. Line 5 is a line I wrote manually and as you see Notepad++ was able to find it, but it couldn’t find the “Roman Empire” in Line 1. When I counted “Roman Empire” in the file it only found it once !
What’s that other strange space ?!
—————————————————– >> Edit: More details :
I wrote this code in Java to check the difference between the 2 spaces :
char a = ' ';
char b = ' ';
System.out.println( (int) a ); // Prints 160
System.out.println( (int) b ); // Prints 32
The strange thing is that the 2 spaces look the same exactly !
Probably a non breaking space. You can look explicitly for them or replace your search string spaces by \s (aka [:space:]).