Deliver individual words without spaces or punctuations

Question

I want to find the first alphabet in each word. So it is more convenient to use StringTokenizer to deliver individual words one at a time. But I also want to eliminate the whitespaces and all punctuations that might be at the start or the end of a word.For example:
String phrase = "Documen-
tation is i-
mportant."
So if the last token in a line ends with "-", then don't include the first letter of the first token on the next line in the count.
I used StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(phrase, "-."); , but it was not working, can anyone help me?

Answer 1

while((line = in.readLine())!=null)
                                   words = new StringTokenizer(line);
                                   for (int i = 0; i<words.countTokens(); ++i){
                                        while(words.hasMoreTokens())
                                             word = words.nextToken();
                                             word = word.toUpperCase();
                                             ch = word.charAt(0);
                                             if(ch >= 'A' && ch <= 'Z'){
                                                  int inx = (int)ch - (int)'A' ;
                                                  charCount[inx]++ ;
                                                  total++;
                              }I am actually counting the initial letter of each word, so I don't want to include any punctuation in between a word