Question

I would really appreciate it if someone could provide me with a regular expression to do the following.

The rules:

• all words except ‘and’ need wrapping with SYN()
• the String can contain an unlimited amount of words, the same rules appyl to all of the words in the String.

Examples:

‘London and toilet’ to become ‘SYN(London) and SYN(toilet)’

’10 and Mayfield and London’ would become ’10 and SYN(Mayfield) and SYN(London)’ (10 is not wrapped as it is not a word)

The reason for my question is that I am using an ORACLE thesaurus and the SQL syntax requires words to be wrapped with SYN().

I was initially going to split all of the words up in the String by searching for spaces and then using String.format(SYN(%s), ‘London’) to wrap the word in SYN() but I knew that all of this could be done with a regular expression and I thought that there would be some eager regular expression fanatics who would help me out.

Answer 1

Try

System.out.println("10 and Mayfield and London".replaceAll("(\\p{Alpha}+)", "SYN($1)").replace("SYN(and)", "and"));

output

10 and SYN(Mayfield) and SYN(London)