Question

I have a text input containing lots of operators, variable and English words. From this input I have to separate all the operators alone.

As of now I’m using regular expression matching, so the number of operators matched depends on the regular expression. problem I get are ‘= is matched with <=’, ‘& is matched with &&’. I need to match both = and <= separately.

Is there any better way for matching the operators other than regex?

Answer 1

There probably is. But as an alternative, you could have your regex as (e.g.):

[><=&|]+

(Modify to your specifications – not sure if you want addition, subtraction, ++ for incrementing etc too).

The + means “one or more” and so the regex matches as many characters as possible, meaning that if <= is in the text, it will match <= rather than < and then =.

Then, only once you’ve extracted all the matches, loop through them all and classify them.