Question

I need a sentence parser. Where parser splits complete sentence based on white character. And it treats complete contents inside parenthesis as a single word (parsed one).

Input sentence:-

“This is the work (my real job) which is great.”

Output required:-

This 

is 

the 

work

(my real job)

which 

is 

great.

Answer 1

Not sure if there’s a nice way to use this regexp to parse out words from a sentence like that. You may need to iterate through the sentence regardless. I don’t think String.split() is going to do it for you. Just write a loop to do this for you, then you can handle the specifics of when the parens don’t match. For example, this will assume everything is a word even if the sentence ends and there is no closing parentheses:

     String s = "This is the work (my real job) which is great, and (also some stuff";

     ArrayList<String> words = new ArrayList<String>();
     Scanner sentence = new Scanner(s);
     boolean inParen = false;
     StringBuilder inParenWord = new StringBuilder();
     while(sentence.hasNext()) {
        String word = sentence.next();
        if(inParen) {
           inParenWord.append(" ");
           inParenWord.append(word);

           if(word.endsWith(")")) {
              words.add(inParenWord.toString());
              inParenWord = new StringBuilder();
              inParen = false;
           }
        }
        else {
           if(word.startsWith("(")) {
              inParen = true;
              inParenWord.append(word);
           }
           else {
              words.add(word);
           }
        }
     }

     if(inParenWord.length()>0) {
        words.add(inParenWord.toString());
     }


     for(String word : words) {
        System.out.println(word);
     }

which would output:

This
is
the
work
(my real job)
which
is
great,
and
(also some stuff

Or using a Pattern/Matcher:

     String s = "This is the work (my real job) which is great, and (also somet stuff";

     ArrayList<String> words = new ArrayList<String>();

     Pattern p = Pattern.compile(" ?([^(][^ ]+|\\([^\\)]+\\)?)");
     Matcher m = p.matcher(s);

     while(m.find()) {
        words.add(s.substring(m.start(),m.end()).trim());
     }

     for(String word : words) {
        System.out.println(word);
     }