How to find phrase with dots?

Question

There is some text like this:

*text text text Bank of America, N.A., text text text*

I need to find the phrase "Bank of America, N.A." and I use a regular expression with word boundaries:

"\\b" + Pattern.quote(phrase) + "\\b"

But it doesn't work. Here is my code:

String line = "text text text Bank of America, N.A., text text text";
for (String phrase: new String[] {"Bank of America", "Bank of America, N.", "Bank of America, N.A", "Bank of America, N.A.", "Bank of America, N.A.,", "Bank of America, N.A., "}){
   Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\b" + Pattern.quote(phrase) + "\\b");
   System.out.println(phrase + " = " + p.matcher(line).find());
}

The result is:

Bank of America = true
Bank of America, N. = true
Bank of America, N.A = true
Bank of America, N.A. = false
Bank of America, N.A., = false
Bank of America, N.A.,  = true

I don't understand why the result of the phrase "Bank of America, N." is true, and false for the phrase "Bank of America, N.A."?

one note, your regex should be `Bank of America, N\.` instead, coz `.` match anything instead of dot. The reason why it fail for `\bBank of America, N.A.\b` is because the position between a `.` and `,` is not considered as word boundary — Adrian Shum, Mar 30 '17 at 09:04
Use `Pattern.compile("(?<!\\w)(" + Pattern.quote(phrase) + ")(?!\\w)");` — Wiktor Stribiżew, Mar 30 '17 at 09:05
Remove the second `\\b` and [the regex will match all the strings](http://ideone.com/n1PeB1). — Alexander Farber, Mar 30 '17 at 09:09
@AdrianShum I use Pattern.quote to escape my sequence in \Q \E. As I understood your comment, you propose to escape dot between \Q and \E? — Alexander Dyuzhev, Mar 30 '17 at 12:20
@AlexanderDyuzhev My fault :) I didn't notice the `Pattern.quote`. — Adrian Shum, Mar 31 '17 at 02:49

How to find phrase with dots?

0 Answers0