Checking The Contents of a String

[jayragz]

Hey,

Is it possible to check the contents of a string and treat the numeric and string values differently?

For example if the user of the program enters "300 dogs",check for the presence of both the number "300" and the string "dogs" and use them separately.

[JosAH]

Hey,

Is it possible to check the contents of a string and treat the numeric and string values differently?

For example if the user of the program enters "300 dogs",check for the presence of both the number "300" and the string "dogs" and use them separately.

Sure, you can use regular expressions for that task e.g. you can also do it manually by using one of the numerous methods implemented in the String class itself (with a bit of help from the utiliy methods in the Character class). Read the API documentation for those classes.

kind regards,

Jos

[Dark]

String (Java Platform SE 6)

Just to speed up your search in the API.

[jayragz]

Thanx,though what Im seeing with string functions is that you have to know the exact value of what is inside the string,is there no way you can get unknown values.

or do you have to test for every single number and letter?

[Norm]

have to know the exact value of what is inside the string

Not really. Then structure of the String must have some rules.
If you know that the tokens/words in the String are separated by some character, you can use a method in the String class to put all the tokens/words into an array. Also the StringTokenizer class will do that.
If there are no separators, eg "300dogs" then you'd have to look char by char.

[jayragz]

Actually there is a space between the numerics and the characters. Maybe it just seems lazy but I want to get the number as a whole.

Simply put If its "300 dogs" i want to make a calculation based on the fact that they are dogs.
The checking if they are dogs is not a problem,
its the number before the space that i want to fetch and deposit in a formula.

[Norm]

Again its a question of the format of your data. Do you know the first token is a number and the second token a String? Then parse the input into two tokens and use the Integer parse method to convert the first token to a number.

[jayragz]

I solved the problem using the String.split() function and it worked just fine.

Thanx for the help,it was really appreciated.