Question

My program counts words and sentences and I figured out how to count words pretty easily but I’m having a problem counting the sentences.

Here’s my code:

Scanner in = new Scanner(file);
in.useDelimiter(""); 
while (in.hasNext()) { 
String word = in.next(); 
char ch = word.charAt(0);        
String temp = readWord.replaceAll("...", " ").replaceAll("--", " ");         
     if(temp.contains(".") || (temp.contains("!") || temp.contains("?!"))) {
         if(ch == '.') 
             sentences++;
            }
        }

It works fine with a sentence like:

“Hi, my name is Blah.”

But it doesn’t for this one:

“I don’t know…maybe he doesn’t like it.”

The word counter works but the sentence counter doesn’t. It counts the ellipsis too even when I told it to replace it with an empty space.

Does anyone know what I did wrong?

Answer 1

The replaceAll() method first argument is a regular expression (regex), not a literal string to match. In a regex, the dot means “any character”. if you really want to match the dot character you have to use a backslash before the dot (and if you want to enter a backslash in a string literal, you need another backslash before the backslash).

The other thing is that replaceAll() does not change the string itself but returns a new string which contains the replacement.