How to match the nth word in a string?

Question

Hi, when I have a string like
"AA BBBB CCC DDDDDD EEE FF"
all words are of the form \w+
and I'd like to match the nth word, for example the third would be "CCC",
how can I establish this with just one regular expression?
Some annotations:
This is done with Java 1.4, but tools like the string tokenizer are not
possible (restrictions of the application) We're limited to one regular expression!
In Perl, one would do it this way:
This would be the regular expression:
"[\w+\s+\w+\s+](w+)"
and with the help of $1, you might match the first paranthesis.
As I said before, this is no solution here, because we're limited to one
regular expression
Another idea for Java Regex would be to define a positive lookahead, like (?<=\w+\s+\w+\s+), but as the width of it is variable, it is not allowed!
Thanks for your help,
Heiko Kubidsky

Answer 1

well, i did another test class
import java.util.regex.*;
public class NthMatch {
public static void main(String[] args) {
  Pattern p = Pattern.compile(
    "(?:\\w+\\s+){" + args[1] + "}(\\w+)(?:\\s.*)?");
  Matcher m = p.matcher(args[0]);
  if (m.matches())
   System.out.println(m.group(1));
  else
   System.out.println("no match");
}run: java NthMatch "aa bb cc dd" 2
does that help?
what kind of framework you have to squeese the regex in?
what do you want to do with that regex?
do you want to check if Nth word maches something, or do you want to retriev that Nth string? or are you trying to do anything else?
your explanation is unfortunatelly not sufficient :(