Re: regex for any word from a set of words

Flip the problem around...

listOfWords = " word, word2, word3 " // note spaces... or get fancy
with ^, $ and conditionals

myWord = "word"

String pattern = "\\W" + myWord + "\\W"

Pattern regPattern = Pattern.compile(pattern)
Matcher matcher = regPattern.matcher(listOfWords)
if(matcher.find()) {
   // do your stuff...
}

... note there are much more elegant pattern matchers but I chose a
brutish solution of forcing a non-word character to appear in front
and behind each key word. I ran this is a short groovy script before I
sent it. I think it works.

NOTE: Groovy script is great for testing out little snippets like
this... but it is important not to start to lean on Groovy-isms if you
plan on dropping the code back into straight Java.

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Tim Jowers <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm seeking to define a regular expression to match on one of a set of
> words. Does anyone have a trick for this? Does anyone have a trick for
> negative search (find all but strings having a word)?
>
>  Specifically, EMC Smarts network monitoring software allows subscription to
> events based on a regular expression. We do not want noise events like
> "Unresponsive" or "Duplicate".
>
> To match all, I can use:
>  .*
> To match the ones I do NOT want I could use:
> .*Unresponsive$  to find matches to with Unresponsive
> .*[U|D][n|u][r|p][e|l][s|i][p|c][o|a][n|t]s?i?v?e"
>
> But of course the last one also matches other letter combinations like
> "Unplicate". :-) This could be OK for our scenario as we have defined a
> small set of event types.
>
> But what about NOT having a word. I've searched for this on the net for
> about 1.5 hours and tried various things but does anyone know a good way to
> write a regular expression to match any strings *without* a word from a set
> of words?
>
> I can contrive something to match anything except the word "Unresponsive"
> for instance:
> ".+?_(?!U(?:n(?!r(?:e(?:s(?!p(?:o(?!s)))))))).+?"
>
> Unfortunately, the "groups" created with parenthesis really are not much use
> in Pattern.matches but only when iterating for matches. E.g. I can find
> matches with:
>     String regex = ".+?com_(?!Unresponsive)";
>      Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(regex);
>     Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(candidateString);
>     while (matcher.find()) {
>       System.out.println("MATCH:" + matcher.group() );
>     }
> The (?!  signifies the negative search and works fine for making groups but
> does not seem to work for testing if an expression matches or not. I can try
> the ^ operator but like everything else it only seems to apply to the next
> character.
>
> My reasoning is the regular expression logic creates a match graph based on
> characters so any "word" matching really has to be distilled to character
> matching which make the use of a Regular Expression for this task a tedious
> challenge at best and error prone at least. Has anyone found a class or
> library with a Regular Expression style functionality but operating on
> Strings? Or Strings as well as characters?
>
>
> Thanks!
> TimJowers
>
>
>
>
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>



-- 
/** Shawn.Hartsock http://hartsock.blogspot.com/ //*/