Question

Why does wordCount end up being 1, rather than 5, in the code below?

import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class WordCount {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        final Pattern wordCountRegularExpression = Pattern.compile("\\S+");
        final Matcher matcher = wordCountRegularExpression
                .matcher("one two three four five");
        int wordCount = 0;
        while (matcher.find()) {
            wordCount++;
        }
        System.out.println("wordCount: " + wordCount);
    }
}

Doesn’t the pattern “\S+” match a word, since it means one or more non-space characters?

This does work by the way:

    final Pattern wordCountRegularExpression = Pattern.compile("\\b\\w+\\b");

But I still don’t understand why the original code doesn’t work.

Answer 1

Doesn’t the pattern “\S+” match a word, since it means one or more non-space characters?

Yes.