I want to select the first N words of a text string.
I have tried split()
and substring()
to no avail.
What I want is to select the first 3 words of the following prayer and copy them to another variable.
For example if I have a string:
String greeting = "Hello this is just an example"
I want to get into the variable Z the first 3 words so that
Z = "Hello this is"
String myString = "Copying first N numbers of words to a string";
String [] arr = myString.split("\\s+");
//Splits words & assign to the arr[] ex : arr[0] -> Copying ,arr[1] -> first
int N=3; // NUMBER OF WORDS THAT YOU NEED
String nWords="";
// concatenating number of words that you required
for(int i=0; i<N ; i++){
nWords = nWords + " " + arr[i] ;
}
System.out.println(nWords);
NOTE : Here .split() function returns an array of strings computed by splitting a given string around matches of the given regular expression
so if i write the code like follows
String myString = "1234M567M98723651";
String[] arr = myString.split("M"); //idea : split the words if 'M' presents
then answers will be :
1234 and 567 where stored into an array.
This is doing by storing the split values into the given array. first split value store to arr[0], second goes to arr[1].
Later part of the code is for concatenating the required number of split words
Hope that you can get an idea from this!!!
Thank you!
public String getFirstNStrings(String str, int n) {
String[] sArr = str.split(" ");
String firstStrs = "";
for(int i = 0; i < n; i++)
firstStrs += sArr[i] + " ";
return firstStrs.trim();
}
Now getFirstNStrings("Hello this is just an example", 3);
will output:
Hello this is
You could try something like:
String greeting = "Hello this is just an example";
int end = 0;
for (int i=0; i<3; i++) {
end = greeting.indexOf(' ', end) + 1;
}
String Z = greeting.substring(0, end - 1);
N.B. This assumes there are at least three space characters in your source string. Any less and this code will probably fail.
Add this in a utility class, such as Util.java
public static String getFirstNWords(String s, int n) {
if (s == null) return null;
String [] sArr = s.split("\\s+");
if (n >= sArr.length)
return s;
String firstN = "";
for (int i=0; i<n-1; i++) {
firstN += sArr[i] + " ";
}
firstN += sArr[n-1];
return firstN;
}
Usage:
Util.getFirstNWords("This will give you the first N words", 3);
---->
"This will give"
If you use Apache Commons Lang3, you can make it a little shorter like this:
public String firstNWords(String input, int numOfWords) {
String[] tokens = input.split(" ");
tokens = ArrayUtils.subarray(tokens, 0, numOfWords);
return StringUtils.join(tokens, ' ');
}