scala exactly matching a word in a given string

Question

I am trying to replace an exact match of a word in a string using scala

\"\\\\bhello\\\\b\".r.replaceAllIn(\"hello I am helloclass with hello.method\",\"xxx\         


        

Answer 1

This depends on how you want to define "word". If the "words" are what you get when you split a string by sequences of whitespace characters, then you can write:

"(?<=^|\\s)hello(?=\\s|$)".r.replaceAllIn("hello I am helloclass with hello.method","xxx")

where (?<=^|\\s) means "preceded by start-of-string or whitespace" and (?=\\s|$) means "followed by whitespace or end-of-string".

Note that this would view (for example) the string Tell my wife hello. as containing four "words", of which the fourth is hello., not hello. You can address that by defining "word" in a more complicated way, but you need to define it first.