How can I measure the distance between two words in Java?

Question

Very straightforward question: how can I measure the distance between two words in a text in Java? For example, the text could be:

The color of the car is blue.

How can I get the distance of the word color and blue in this sentence? I know that the distance from color to blue is 5. How can I get this distance of 5 in Java?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Here is what you can do:

1. Split the array according to whitespaces.
2. Get the index of the first word.
3. Get the index of the second word.
4. Subtract the indexes, that's the "distance".

Translating this to Java is straightforward.. I leave it for you.

Answer 2

This could be an approximation to the solution:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    final String strWords = "The color of the car is blue.";
    final String word1 = "color";
    final String word2 = "blue";

    // Remove any special chars from string
    final String strOnlyWords = strWords.replace(",", "").replace(".", "");

    final List<String> words = Arrays.asList(strOnlyWords.split(" "));
    final int index1 = words.indexOf(word1);
    final int index2 = words.indexOf(word2);
    int distance = -1;

    // Check index of two words
    if (index1 != -1 && index2 != - 1) {
        distance = index2 - index1;
    }

    System.out.println(distance);
}

Answer 3

You can do it by following code:

    String s = "The color of the car is blue";
    String[] arr = s.split(" ");
    int startIndex = -1;
    int endIndex = -1;
    for(int i=0; i<arr.length; i++){
        if(arr[i].equals("color")){
            startIndex = i;
        }
        else if(arr[i].equals("blue")){
            endIndex = i;
        }
    }
    System.out.println("distance is: " + (endIndex-startIndex));