Let's say I have a String array that contains some letters and punctuation
String letter[] = {"a","b","c",".","a"};
In letter[3] we have "."
How can I check if a string is a punctuation character?
We know that there are many possible punctuation characters (,.?! etc.)
My progress so far:
for (int a = 0; a < letter.length; a++) {
if (letter[a].equals(".")) { //===>> i'm confused in this line
System.out.println ("it's punctuation");
} else {
System.out.println ("just letter");
}
}
Do you want to check more punctuations other than just .
?
If so you can do this.
String punctuations = ".,:;";//add all the punctuation marks you want.
...
if(punctuations.contains(letter[a]))
Here is one way to do it with regular expressions:
if (Pattern.matches("\\p{Punct}", str)) {
...
}
The \p{Punct}
regular expression is a POSIX pattern representing a single punctuation character.
Depending on your needs, you could use either
Pattern.matches("\\p{Punct}", str)
or
Pattern.matches("\\p{IsPunctuation}", str)
The first pattern matches the following 32 characters: !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~
The second pattern matches a whopping 632 unicode characters, including, for example: «
, »
, ¿
, ¡
, §
, ¶
, ‘
, ’
, “
, ”
, and ‽
.
Interestingly, not all of the 32 characters matched by the first pattern are matched by the second. The second pattern does not match the following 9 characters: $
, +
, <
, =
, >
, ^
, `
, |
, and ~
(which the first pattern does match).
If you want to match for any character from either character set, you could do:
Pattern.matches("[\\p{Punct}\\p{IsPunctuation}]", str)
Try this method: Character.isLetter(). It returns true if the character is a letter (a-z, uppercase or lowercase), returns false if character is numeric or symbol.
e.g. boolean answer = Character.isLetter('!');
answer will be equal to false.