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Java Java Data Structures Organizing Data Splitting Strings

Wan Nor Adzahari Wan Tajuddin
Wan Nor Adzahari Wan Tajuddin
2,438 Points

What is regular expression \s+ ?

In the Splitting Strings video, Craig used \w to take out all the words comprising of letter A to Z from a string. So why is it that in this code challenge we are using \s instead?

com/example/BlogPost.java
package com.example;

import java.util.Date;

public class BlogPost {
  private String mAuthor;
  private String mTitle;
  private String mBody;
  private String mCategory;
  private Date mCreationDate;

  public BlogPost(String author, String title, String body, String category, Date creationDate) {
    mAuthor = author;
    mTitle = title;
    mBody = body;
    mCategory = category;
    mCreationDate = creationDate;
  }

  public String getAuthor() {
    return mAuthor;
  }

  public String getTitle() {
    return mTitle;
  }

  public String getBody() {
    return mBody;
  }

  public String getCategory() {
    return mCategory;
  }

  public Date getCreationDate() {
    return mCreationDate;
  }

  public String[] getWords() {
    return mBody.split("[^\\s]+");
  }

}

1 Answer

Rebekah Smith
Rebekah Smith
7,263 Points

Here's an excerpt from the challenge description:

"Since we don't need to worry about special characters, let's just use the regular expression pattern \s+ (or any one or more white space character)"

\s indicates a white space. So [^\s] is any non-white space and includes letters, numbers, special characters

\w indicates a word character, equivalent to [a-zA-Z_0-9]. Special characters don't match.