Help with String conversions

[Syed Saulat Rizvi]

Hi

I need to convert Strings like 'baseball t shirts' or 'smokless e cigerattes' into 'baseball t-shirts' or 'smokless e-cigerattes' in java, can any body tell me how can i do that.

I dont want to search each character like 't' or 'e' in this example for spaces.

I thought indexOf will do that for me but not

 public static void main(String[] args) {

        String x =  "baseball t shirts";
        String y = 'smokless e cigerattes'

        System.out.println(x.indexOf(" %c "));  // if x contains a single character having spaces on both sides

    }   

Help will be appreciated

[Sridhar Santhanakrishnan]

If this is the format the strings will be in, you can get the last index of the space character and replace that with a hyphen.

[fred rosenberger]

examples are nice, but they don't define the conditions. You need to give explicit rules on when you need to insert a hyphen and when you don't. Once you define the rules, coding is easy.

So, what are the rules? is any 't' character followed by a space, followed by a word to be combined? same with 'e' followed by space? Does the case of any of the letters make a difference? What if there are multiple spaces?

[Rob Spoor]

Check out java.util.regex.Pattern in combination with java.util.regex.Matcher. In short:
- create a Pattern with the right pattern
- get a Matcher from the pattern for the input string
- use the matcher to search once (hint: the method is not called search but still quite similar)
- use the start of the match as the index of the found match