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Deleting content of every string after first empty space

How can I delete everything after first empty space in a string which user selects? I was reading this how to remove some words from a string in java. Can this help me in my case?

You can use replaceAll with a regex \s.* which match every thing after space:
String str = "Hello java word!";
str = str.replaceAll("\\s.*", "");
output
Hello
regex demo
Like #Coffeehouse Coder mention in comment, This solution will replace every thing if the input start with space, so if you want to avoid this case, you can trim your input using string.trim() so it can remove the spaces in start and in end.

Assuming that there is no space in the beginning of the string.
Follow these steps-
Split the string at space. It will create an array.
Get the first element of that array.
Hope this helps.
str = "Example string"
String[] _arr = str.split("\\s");
String word = _arr[0];
You need to consider multiple white spaces and space in the beginning before considering the above code.
I am not native to JAVA Programming but have an idea that it has split function for string.
And the reference you cited in the question is bit complex, while you can achieve the desired thing very easily.
P.S. In future if you make a mind to get two words or three, splitting method is better (assuming you have already dealt with multiple white-spaces) else substring is better.

A simple way to do it can be:
System.out.println("Hello world!".split(" ")[0]);

// Taking 'str' as your string
// To remove the first space(s) of the string,
str = str.trim();
int index = str.indexOf(" ");
String word = str.substring(0, index);
This is just one method of many.
str = str.replaceAll("\\s+", " "); // This replaces one or more spaces with one space
String[] words = str.split("\\s");
String first = words[0];

The simplest solution in my opinion would be to just locate the index which the user wants it to be cut off at and then call the substring() method from 0 to the index they wanted. Set that = to a new string and you have the string they want.
If you want to replace the string then just set the original string = to the result of the substring() method.
Link to substring() method: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#substring(int,%20int)

There are already 5 perfectly good answers, so let me add a sixth one. Variety is the spice of life!
private static final Pattern FIRST_WORD = Pattern.compile("\\S+");
public static String firstWord(CharSequence text) {
Matcher m = FIRST_WORD.matcher(text);
return m.find() ? m.group() : "";
}
Advantages over the .split(...)[0]-type answers:
It directly does exactly what is being asked, i.e. "Find the first sequence of non-space characters." So the self-documentation is more explicit.
It is more efficient when called on multiple strings (e.g. for batch processing a large list of strings) because the regular expression is compiled only once.
It is more space-efficient because it avoids unnecessarily creating a whole array with references to each word when we only need the first.
It works without having to trim the string.
(I know this is probably too late to be of any use to the OP but I'm leaving it here as an alternative solution for future readers.)

This would be more efficient
String str = "Hello world!";
int spaceInd = str.indexOf(' ');
if(spaceInd != -1) {
str = str.substring(0, spaceInd);
}
System.out.println(String.format("[%s]", str));

Replace parts of a string in Java

I need to replace parts of a string by looking up the System properties.
For example, consider the string It was {var1} beauty killed {var2}
I need to parse the string, and replace all the words contained within the parenthesis by looking up their value in System properties. If System.getProperty() returns null, then simply replace with empty character. This is pretty straightforward when I know the variables well ahead. But the string that I need to parse is not defined ahead. I wouldn't know how many number of variables are in the string and what the variable names are. Assuming a simple, well formatted string (no nested parenthesis, open - close matches), what is the simplest or the most elegant way to parse through the string and replace all the character sequences that are enclosed in the parenthesis?
Only solution I could come up with is to traverse the string from the first character, note down the positions of the start and end positions of the parenthesis, replace the string between them, and then continue until reaching the end of the string. Is there simpler way to do this?

You can use the parentheses to break the initial string into substrings, and then replace every other substring.
String[] substituteValues = {"the", "str", "other", "another"};
int substituteValuesIndex = 0;
String test = "Here is {var1} string called {var2}";
// split the string up into substrings
test = test.replaceAll("\\}", "\\{");
String[] splitString = test.split("\\{");
// now sub in your values
for (int k=1; k < splitString.length; k = k+2) {
splitString[k] = substituteValues[substituteValuesIndex];
substituteValuesIndex++;
}
String result = "";
for (String s : splitString) {
result = result + s;
}

Create String[] containing only certain characters

I am trying to create a String[] which contains only words that comprise of certain characters. For example I have a dictionary containing a number of words like so:
arm
army
art
as
at
attack
attempt
attention
attraction
authority
automatic
awake
baby
back
bad
bag
balance
I want to narrow the list down so that it only contains words with the characters a, b and g. Therefore the list should only contain the word 'bag' in this example.
Currently I am trying to do this using regexes but having never used them before I can't seem to get it to work.
Here is my code:
public class LetterJugglingMain {
public static void main(String[] args) {
String dictFile = "/Users/simonrhillary/Desktop/Dictionary(3).txt";
fileReader fr = new fileReader();
fr.openFile(dictFile);
String[] dictionary = fr.fileToArray();
String regx = "able";
String[] newDict = createListOfValidWords(dictionary, regx);
printArray(newDict);
}
public static String[] createListOfValidWords(String[] d, String regex){
List<String> narrowed = new ArrayList<String>();
for(int i = 0; i<d.length; i++){
if(d[i].matches(regex)){
narrowed.add(d[i]);
System.out.println("added " + d[i]);
}
}
String[] narrowArray = narrowed.toArray(new String[0]);
return narrowArray;
}
however the array returned is always empty unless the String regex is the exact word! Any ideas? I can post more code if needed...I think I must be trying to initialise the regex wrong.
The narrowed down list must contain ONLY the characters from the regex.

Frankly, I'm not an expert in regexes, but I don't think it's the best tool to do what you want. I would use a method like the following:
public boolean containsAll(String s, Set<Character> chars) {
Set<Character> copy = new HashSet<Character>();
for (int i = 0; i < s.length() && copy.size() < chars.size(); i++) {
char c = s.charAt(i);
if (chars.contains(c)) {
copy.add(c);
}
}
return copy.size() == chars.size();
}

The regex able will match only the string "able". However, if you want a regular expression to match either character of a, b, l or e, the regex you're looking for is [able] (in brackets). If you want words containing several such characters, add a + for repeating the pattern: [able]+.

The OP wants words that contain every character. Not just one of them.
And other characters are not a problem.
If this is the case, I think the simiplest way would be to loop through the entire string, character by character, and check to see if it contains all of the characters you want. Keep flags to check and see if every character has been found.
If this isn't the case.... :
Try using the regex:
^[able]+$
Here's what it does:
^ matches the beginning of the string and $ matches the end of the string. This makes sure that you're not getting a partial match.
[able] matches the characters you want the string to consist of, in this case a, b, l, and e. + Makes sure that there are 1 or more of these characters in the string.
Note: This regex will match a string that contains these 4 letters. For example, it will match:
able, albe, aeble, aaaabbblllleeee
and will not match
qable, treatable, and abled.

A sample regex that filters out words that contains at least one occurrence of all characters in a set. This will match any English word (case-insensitive) that contains at least one occurrence of all the characters a, b, g:
(?i)(?=.*a)(?=.*b)(?=.*g)[a-z]+
Example of strings that match would be bag, baggy, grab.
Example of strings that don't match would be big, argument, nothing.
The (?i) means turns on case-insensitive flag.
You need to append as many (?=.*<character>) as the number of characters in the set, for each of the characters.
I assume a word only contains English alphabet, so I specify [a-z]. Specify more if you need space, hyphen, etc.
I assume matches(String regex) method in String class, so I omitted the ^ and $.
The performance may be bad, since in the worst case (the characters are found at the end of the words), I think that the regex engine may go through the string for around n times where n is the number of characters in the set. It may not be an actual concern at all, since the words are very short, but if it turns out that this is a bottleneck, you may consider doing simple looping.

Select words with at least two different letters

I am using this code
Matcher m2 = Pattern.compile("\\b[ABE]+\\b").matcher(key);
to only get keys from a HashMap that contain the letters A, B or E
I am not though interested in words such as AAAAAA or EEEEE I need words with at least two different letters (in the best case, three).
Is there a way to modify the regex ? Can anyone offer insight on this?

Replace everything except your letters, make a Set of the result, test the Set for size.
public static void main (String args[])
{
String alphabet = "ABC";
String totest = "BBA";
if (args.length == 2)
{
alphabet = args[0];
totest = args[1];
}
String cleared = totest.replaceAll ("[^" + alphabet + "]", "");
char[] ca = cleared.toCharArray ();
Set <Character> unique = new HashSet <Character> ();
for (char c: ca)
unique.add (c);
System.out.println ("Result: " + (unique.size () > 1));
}
Example implementation

You could use a more complicated regex to do it e.g.
(.*A.*[BE].*|.*[BE].*A.*)|(.*B.*[AE].*|.*[AE].*B.*)|(.*E.*[BA].*|.*[BA].*E.*)
But it's probably going to be more easy to understand to do some kind of replacement, for instance make a loop that replaces one letter at a time with '', and check the size of the new string each time - if it changes the size of the string twice, then you've got two of your desired characters. EDIT: actually, if you know the set of desired characters at runtime before you do the check, NullUserException had it right in his comment - indexOf or contains will be more efficient and probably more readable than this.
Note that if your set of desired characters is unknown at compile time (or at least pre-string-checking at runtime), the second option is preferable - if you're looking for any characters, just replace all occurrences of the first character in a while(str.length > 0) loop - the number of times it goes through the loop is the number of different characters you've got.

Mark explicitly the repetition of desired letters,
It would look like this :
\b[ABE]{1,3}\b
It matches AAE, EEE, AEE but not AAAA, AAEE

Finding multiple substrings using boundaries in Java

Alright so here is my problem. Basically I have a string with 4 words in it, with each word seperated by a #. What I need to do is use the substring method to extract each word and print it out. I am having trouble figuring out the parameters for it though. I can always get the first one right, but the following ones generally have problems.
Here is the first piece of the code:
word = format.substring( 0 , format.indexOf('#') );
Now from what I understand this basically means start at the beginning of the string, and end right before the #. So using the same logic, I tried to extract the second word like so:
wordTwo = format.substring ( wordlength + 1 , format.indexOf('#') );
//The plus one so I don't start at the #.
But with this I continually get errors saying it doesn't exist. I figured that the compiler was trying to read the first # before the second word, so I rewrote it like so:
wordTwo = format.substring (wordlength + 1, 1 + wordLength + format.indexOf('#') );
And with this it just completely screws it up, either not printing the second word or not stopping in the right place. If I could get any help on the formatting of this, it would be greatly appreciated. Since this is for a class, I am limited to using very basic methods such as indexOf, length, substring etc. so if you could refrain from using anything to complex that would be amazing!

If you have to use substring then you need to use the variant of indexOf that takes a start. This means you can start look for the second # by starting the search after the first one. I.e.
wordTwo = format.substring ( wordlength + 1 , format.indexOf('#', wordlength + 1 ) );
There are however much better ways of splitting a string on a delimiter like this. You can use a StringTokenizer. This is designed for splitting strings like this. Basically:
StringTokenizer tok = new StringTokenizer(format, "#");
String word = tok.nextToken();
String word2 = tok.nextToken();
String word3 = tok.nextToken();
Or you can use the String.split method which is designed for splitting strings. e.g.
String[] parts = String.split("#");
String word = parts[0];
String word2 = parts[1];
String word3 = parts[2];

You can go with split() for this kind of formatting strings.
For instance if you have string like,
String text = "Word1#Word2#Word3#Word4";
You can use delimiter as,
String delimiter = "#";
Then create an string array like,
String[] temp;
For splitting string,
temp = text.split(delimiter);
You can get words like this,
temp[0] = "Word1";
temp[1] = "Word2";
temp[2] = "Word3";
temp[3] = "Word4";

Use split() method to do this with "#" as the delimiter
String s = "hi#vivek#is#good";
String temp = new String();
String[] arr = s.split("#");
for(String x : arr){
temp = temp + x;
}
Or if you want to exact each word... you have it already in arr
arr[0] ---> First Word
arr[1] ---> Second Word
arr[2] ---> Third Word

I suggest that you've a look at the Javadoc for String before you proceed further.
Since this is your homework, I'll give you a couple of hints and maybe you can solve it yourself:
The format for subString is public void subString(int beginIndex, int endIndex). As per the javadoc for this method:
Returns a new string that is a substring of this string. The substring
begins at the specified beginIndex and extends to the character at
index endIndex - 1. Thus the length of the substring is
endIndex-beginIndex.
Note that if you've to use this method, understand that you'll have to shift your beginIndex and endIndex each time because in your situation, you'll have multiple words that are separated by #.
However if you look closely, there's another method in String class that might be helpful to you. That's the public String[] split(String regex) method. The javadoc for this one states:
Splits this string around matches of the given regular expression.
This method works as if by invoking the two-argument split method with
the given expression and a limit argument of zero. Trailing empty
strings are therefore not included in the resulting array.
The split() method looks pretty interesting for your case. You can split your String with the delimiter that you have as the parameter to this method, get the String array and work with that.
Hope this helps you to understand your problem and get started towards a solution :)

Since this is a home work, it may be better to have try to write it your self. But I will give a clue.
Clue:
The indexOf method has another overload: int indexOf(int chr,
int fromIndex) which find the first character chr in the string
from the fromIndex.
http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/java/lang/String.html
From this clue, the program will look something like this:
Find the index of the first '#' from the start of the string.
Extract the word from 0th character to that index.
Find the index of the first '#' from the character AFTER the first '#'.
Extract the word from the first '#' that index.
... Just do it until you get 4 words or the string ends.
Hope this helps.

I don't know why you're forced to use String#substring, but as others have mentioned, it seems like the wrong method for the kind of functionality you need.
String#split(String regex) is what you would use for such a problem, or, if your input sequence is something you don't control, I would suggest you look at the overloaded method String#split(String regex, int limit); this way you can impose a limit on the amount of matches you make, controlling your resulting array.