Question

I have a parsing question.
I have sentences that are stored as Strings. I want to grab each word in each sentence however I would like to filter which words I grab. For example say I have a sentence like the following:

Hell0 3v3ryb0dy @ stackoverflow $people \implies queen$ equals ~queen –> ~people.
/#logic

I would do the following:

1. grab ‘H3ll0’
2. grab 3v3ryb0dy
3. throw away the @
4. grab ‘people’ from ‘$people’
5. grab ‘implies’ from ‘\implies’
6. grab ‘queen’ from ‘queen$’
7. grab ‘equals’
8. grab ‘queen’ from ‘~queen’
9. throw away –>
10. grab ‘people’ from ‘~people’
11. grab ‘logic’ from ‘/#logic’

Essentially I want only alphanumeric characters and whenever I have some other character such as a \ before or after a word I want to disregard this other character.

Currently I am doing:sentence.split(" ")

This gets the individual words from the sentence but it grabs ‘$people’ and ‘~people’ and treats them differently when I want them to be treated the same.

1. How can I achieve this?
2. Would a regex help me here?

Answer 1

Split the string with this regex \\W+, split at one or more non-word character(s).

String sentence = "Hell0 3v3ryb0dy @ stackoverflow $people \\implies queen$ equals ~queen --> ~people. /#logic";
String[] split = sentence.split("\\W+");
System.out.println(Arrays.asList(split));

Output

[Hell0, 3v3ryb0dy, stackoverflow, people, implies, queen, equals, queen, people, logic]