Even more about deleting the first word in a string

Question

hi, i have this code that removes the first word in a string, returns the shorter string, removes the first word from the shorter string aso... what i would like it to do is to stop when it hits a non-character, but i can't get it to do that. does anyone know why \b won't work?
import java.io.*;
class Testar {
public static void main(String[] args) {
      String partDesc = "Hi my name is SandraPandra.";
      while (partDesc.equals("\b") == false) {  //this is where something goes wrong
          System.out.println(partDesc);
          partDesc = partDesc.replaceFirst("^(\\w+)\\s+","");
} thanx in advance!

Answer 1

  while (partDesc.equals("\b") == false) That compares partDesc to a string consisting of one backspace character. I suspect you're trying to use the regex word-boundary anchor, but that's a dead end. If you want to stop beheading the string when the regex stops matching, you can write the code exactly that way: class Testar {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    String partDesc = "Hi my name is SandraPandra.";
    while ( partDesc.matches("^(\\w+)\\s+.*") ) {
      partDesc = partDesc.replaceFirst("^(\\w+)\\s+","");
      System.out.println(partDesc);
} If performance is a concern, you can use a pre-compiled Pattern object for greater efficiency. Thanks to Matcher's lookingAt() method, you can use the same regex for the test and the replacement: class Testar {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    String partDesc = "Hi my name is SandraPandra.";
    Pattern p = Pattern p = Pattern.compile("^(\\w+)\\s+");
    Matcher m = p.matcher(partDesc);
    while ( m.lookingAt() ) {
      partDesc = m.replaceFirst("");
      System.out.println(partDesc);
      m.reset(partDesc);
} The ^ anchor isn't really necessary in this version, since lookingAt() implicitly anchors the match to the beginning of the string, but you might as well leave it in.