Regular expressions - Split text using any chars except letters

Hello ,

Suppose i've a JTextArea where a user enters some text in any language, and i want to grab each word the user entered, so i want to split that text with any character like this :

This is okay for English text, but i want this also to work if user entered German/Turkish/Arabic/ .... text.
Is this possible ?

Thanks.

why not just split on white space?
i.e.,

This will still leave punctuation marks present though.

yes, right ... but each language has it's own punctuations which i want to use in splitting the text too.
But if there was no other solution then that's my second option.

Have a look at the Java™ Tutorials section, particularly about the predefined character classes. You might be able to create a class for "not something" which might help.

Thanks Campbell ... I've read it.
But sorry, i don''t get it. What's the difference between what you're suggesting & the code example i introduced :

What about \\w or \\W? a-zA-Z only works for English; other languages use different alphabets.

Campbell Ritchie wrote:What about \\w or \\W? a-zA-Z only works for English; other languages use different alphabets.

\w is explicitly specified as "A word character: [a-zA-Z_0-9]". I've tried with é but that was used to split on.

Well ... Temporarily i did this :

So i'm splitting the text using any non-letter English character. But as i said this is not nice, if the user entered any non-letter character of any other language like German or Arabic, it won't split the text.

Any ideas ?

As I very rarely use them, I don't know much about regexes, but I was amazed that they didn't support matching of non-English characters.
So I had a little browse around the web and i found this.
I don't know if it will solve your problem, but from a non-regex expert reading of it, the Unicode Character Properties section looks like it may be useful.

Thanks Joanne.
I guess we were injustice to Regular Expressions, this code will just do it :
\p{L} will return any Unicode letter.
For more info. : Regular Expressions

Thanks

Damn! \\w wouldn't work. But well done, Joanne.

Actually, reading thru the Unicode Character Properties section of that link, it appears accented characters can be either one or two unicode codepoints.
To be absolutely sure of a match, I think you would also need to allow for a letter followed by a non-spacing mark.

To be absolutely sure of a match, I think you would also need to allow for a letter followed by a non-spacing mark.

Let me check i understand you right, do you mean a word like this :
"tt/" or "tté3"

Right ?

Again, "character" really means "Unicode code point". \p{L} matches a single code point in the category "letter". If your input string is à encoded as U+0061 U+0300, it matches a without the accent. If the input is à encoded as U+00E0, it matches à with the accent. The reason is that both the code points U+0061 (a) and U+00E0 (à) are in the category "letter", while U+0300 is in the category "mark".

So, if the à encoded is as U+0061 U+0300, then the first character is the latter a and the second character is not a letter (it is a mark) and so could break any regex that is looking for a string of letters.

Sorry for being late to reply Joanne.
I think i understand you ... if we've a word : "eàe" where à=U+0061 U+0300 .... Then it will be splitted to a word "ea" and "e" ... right ?

If so, i think this will do the job :
I didn't try this one but i think it'll do the job. What do you think Joanne ?

Hesham Gneady wrote:Sorry for being late to reply Joanne.
I think i understand you ... if we've a word : "eàe" where à=U+0061 U+0300 .... Then it will be splitted to a word "ea" and "e" ... right ?

Yes

Hesham Gneady wrote:If so, i think this will do the job :
String[] userWords = userText.split( "[^\\p{L}&&[^\\p{M}]]" );I didn't try this one but i think it'll do the job. What do you think Joanne ?

As I said earlier, I'm not a regex expert. Best way to find out if it's right is to test it.