java regex for any word

Question

im trying to figure out the regex to use to split an essay into words WITHOUT punctuation. I tried splitting by whitespace, but that gives some tokens with the punctuation. I also tried to split by word chars, which returned an array of empty strings for some reason:

String[] words = line.split("\\w+");

Here's the summary of regular expressions constructs. Build your split regex from the appropriate constructs. — Sotirios Delimanolis
– Sotirios Delimanolis, Commented Mar 16, 2014 at 5:51
i read that, since i want to match words, i want to use one or more word characters([a-zA-Z0-9]). once it encounters non word chars it wont match anymore, so I thought that was the regex I needed. I dont see what is wrong with my reasoning for choosing this regex — HukeLau_DABA
– HukeLau_DABA, Commented Mar 16, 2014 at 5:54
In @SotiriosDelimanolis' link to reg ex constructs look for word boundary \b. Then please delete this post. There are answers to this question all over the internet including SO. — Paul Sasik
– Paul Sasik, Commented Mar 16, 2014 at 5:54

Evgeniy Dorofeev · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-16 05:56:29Z

4

try this

String[] words = line.split("\\W+");

answered Mar 16, 2014 at 5:56

Evgeniy Dorofeev

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1 Comment

HukeLau_DABA Over a year ago

funny. I knew about \W in the back of my head and thought to use \s+ first, then got confused and messed up the definition of split and used \w+, and didn't realize to use the opposite of that.

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