Regex whole word [duplicate]

Answer 1

Bzzt! It will naturally return true for the second sentence, since the word the appears two times: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Your second sentence still has the second the.

Your regex is correct. However, you'll need to use the Pattern.find method instead of matches, because matches attempts to match against the whole string. Pattern.find, on the other hand, will locate substrings that match your pattern.

Answer 2

Try this regex:

".*\\bthe\\b.*"

Basically, what you are trying to match it against is the string "the", but you need to return a match even if the input has other things, so you need to put ".*" on both sides for that.

Answer 3

What you need is matcher.find()

http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/regex/Matcher.html#find%28%29

Answer 4

If you use matches, it must match the whole String. String#contains(...) may be what you're looking for, or perhaps you want to put some wild cards before and after your word:

String regex = ".*\\bthe\\b.*";

e.g.,

  String text = "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
  System.out.println(text.matches(regex));