I ran into an even worse problem when searching text for words like .NET, C++, C#, and C. You would think that computer programmers would know better than to name a language something that is hard to write regular expressions for.
Anyway, this is what I found out (summarized mostly from http://www.regular-expressions.info, which is a great site): In most flavors of regex, characters that are matched by the short-hand character class \w are the characters that are treated as word characters by word boundaries. Java is an exception. Java supports Unicode for \b but not for \w. (I'm sure there was a good reason for it at the time).
The \w stands for "word character". It always matches the ASCII characters [A-Za-z0-9_]. Notice the inclusion of the underscore and digits (but not dash!). In most flavors that support Unicode, \w includes many characters from other scripts. There is a lot of inconsistency about which characters are actually included. Letters and digits from alphabetic scripts and ideographs are generally included. Connector punctuation other than the underscore and numeric symbols that aren't digits may or may not be included. XML Schema and XPath even include all symbols in \w. But Java, JavaScript, and PCRE match only ASCII characters with \w.
Which is why Java-based regex searches for C++, C# or .NET (even when you remember to escape the period and pluses) are screwed by the \b.
Note: I'm not sure what to do about mistakes in text, like when someone doesn't put a space after a period at the end of a sentence. I allowed for it, but I'm not sure that it's necessarily the right thing to do.
Anyway, in Java, if you're searching text for the those weird-named languages, you need to replace the \b with before and after whitespace and punctuation designators. For example:
public static String grep(String regexp, String multiLineStringToSearch) {
String result = "";
String[] lines = multiLineStringToSearch.split("\\n");
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regexp);
for (String line : lines) {
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(line);
if (matcher.find()) {
result = result + "\n" + line;
}
}
return result.trim();
}
Then in your test or main function:
String beforeWord = "(\\s|\\.|\\,|\\!|\\?|\\(|\\)|\\'|\\\"|^)";
String afterWord = "(\\s|\\.|\\,|\\!|\\?|\\(|\\)|\\'|\\\"|$)";
text = "Programming in C, (C++) C#, Java, and .NET.";
System.out.println("text="+text);
// Here is where Java word boundaries do not work correctly on "cutesy" computer language names.
System.out.println("Bad word boundary can't find because of Java: grep with word boundary for .NET="+ grep("\\b\\.NET\\b", text));
System.out.println("Should find: grep exactly for .NET="+ grep(beforeWord+"\\.NET"+afterWord, text));
System.out.println("Bad word boundary can't find because of Java: grep with word boundary for C#="+ grep("\\bC#\\b", text));
System.out.println("Should find: grep exactly for C#="+ grep("C#"+afterWord, text));
System.out.println("Bad word boundary can't find because of Java:grep with word boundary for C++="+ grep("\\bC\\+\\+\\b", text));
System.out.println("Should find: grep exactly for C++="+ grep(beforeWord+"C\\+\\+"+afterWord, text));
System.out.println("Should find: grep with word boundary for Java="+ grep("\\bJava\\b", text));
System.out.println("Should find: grep for case-insensitive java="+ grep("?i)\\bjava\\b", text));
System.out.println("Should find: grep with word boundary for C="+ grep("\\bC\\b", text)); // Works Ok for this example, but see below
// Because of the stupid too-short cutsey name, searches find stuff it shouldn't.
text = "Worked on C&O (Chesapeake and Ohio) Canal when I was younger; more recently developed in Lisp.";
System.out.println("text="+text);
System.out.println("Bad word boundary because of C name: grep with word boundary for C="+ grep("\\bC\\b", text));
System.out.println("Should be blank: grep exactly for C="+ grep(beforeWord+"C"+afterWord, text));
// Make sure the first and last cases work OK.
text = "C is a language that should have been named differently.";
System.out.println("text="+text);
System.out.println("grep exactly for C="+ grep(beforeWord+"C"+afterWord, text));
text = "One language that should have been named differently is C";
System.out.println("text="+text);
System.out.println("grep exactly for C="+ grep(beforeWord+"C"+afterWord, text));
//Make sure we don't get false positives
text = "The letter 'c' can be hard as in Cat, or soft as in Cindy. Computer languages should not require disambiguation (e.g. Ruby, Python vs. Fortran, Hadoop)";
System.out.println("text="+text);
System.out.println("Should be blank: grep exactly for C="+ grep(beforeWord+"C"+afterWord, text));
P.S. My thanks to http://regexpal.com/ without whom the regex world would be very miserable!
