split() function problem.

Hi guys. I'm trying to develop a small program for my final year project at university, but am having some issues with the split function.

What I'm attempting to do is split a sentence into its composite words, each one being held in an array, which is then compared in turn against a list of words in another array.

My problem comes when I attempt to compare words that come at the end of a sentence or before a comma. I want to split the words whilst also removing any such punctuation. Can you suggest a way of doing this? Currently my splitting function looks like this:

for (int i = 0; i < sentences.length; i++)
{

//Split the string into its seperate elements
holdingString = sentences[i];
words = holdingString.split(" ");
}

Thanks for the help.

I'm no regular expressions expert, but I'd look to split with a regex that combines white space and punctuation, perhaps something as simple as "[\\s\\.,]+".

e.g.,

Code:

---

import java.util.Arrays;

public class SplitTest {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    String test = "Hello world.  It's common knowledge that fubars rule, and that snafus drool.";
    String regex = "[\\s\\.,]+";
   
    String[] tokens = test.split(regex);
    System.out.println(Arrays.toString(tokens));
   
  }
}

---

Wonderful, that has worked perfectly. Thanks very much!