help with String?

[Bashar Ayyash]

Hi guys,

I have a String sentence (for ex. "Welcome back back back home home!!!"), I want to remove the redundancy in the statement ("Welcome back home!")

Is there any method in String, or StringBuffer class help me do that?

Regards,

[Avinash Rawana]

You could use a tokenizer and search for duplicates.

I believe the class name is StringTokenizer.

[Garrett Rowe]

It can also be done with regular expressions and the replaceAll() method of String class, if you're somewhat familliar with regular expressions.

public class RegexTest
{
   public static void main(String[] args)
   {
      String test = "Welcome back back home Mike Mike Mike!!!!!!";
 
      //Replace all duplicate words
      String result = test.replaceAll("\\b(\\w+)\\b(?:\\W+\\1)+", "$1");
      //Replace all duplicate punctuation
      result = result.replaceAll("(\\p{Punct})\\1+", "$1");
 
      System.out.println(result);
   }
}

Although I have to admit, this regex doesnt preserve punctuation that occurs after a repeated word i.e.:
"back, back, back," --> "back"

I suspect that if you play around with it a little, that can be fixed too.

[edit: found a bug in my regex]
[ March 25, 2006: Message edited by: Garrett Rowe ]