Question

Using indexOf after reading a file, How would one code indexOf for only specific characters before and after a word?

for example

‘billy’

Single Quotes: 2

bi’lly

Single Quotes: 0

My Code

if ( 0 <= name.indexOf("'")){
        singleQuotes++;

My code will count all of the single quotes, How can I make it so when it reads a file with a bunch of words. To only get the single quotes at the beginning and end of each word?

Answer 1

You can use regular expressions for that. The expression that you need looks like this:

(^|\s)'|'(\s|$)

Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(^|\\s)'|'(\\s|$)");
Matcher m = p.matcher("quick 'brown' fox jump's over 'the' lazy dog");
int cnt = 0;
while(m.find()) {
    cnt++;
}
System.out.println(cnt);

This prints out 4.