Regular expressions and string matching

Question

Hi everyone,
Here is my problem, I have a partially decrypted piece string which would appear something like.
Partially deycrpted:     the?anage??esideshe?e
Plain text:          themanagerresideshere
So you can see that there are a few letter missing from the decryped text. What I am trying to do it insert spaces into the string so that I get:
                    The ?anage? ?esides he?e
I have a method which splits up the string in substrings of varying lengths and then compares the substring with a word from a dictionary (implemented as an arraylist) and then inserts a space.
The problem is that my function does not find the words in the dictionary because my string is only partially decryped.
     Eg:     ?anage? is not stored in the dictionary, but the word �manager� is.
So my question is, is there a way to build a regular expression which would match the partially decrypted text with a word from a dictionary (ie - ?anage? is recognised and �manager� from the dictionary).

Answer 1

I wrote the following method in order to test the matching using . in my regular expression.
public void getWords(int y)
int x = 0;
for(y=y; y < buff.length(); y++){
String strToCompare = buff.substring(x,y); //where buff holds the partially decrypted text
x++;
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(strToCompare);
for(int z = 0; z < dict.size(); z++){
String str = (String) dict.get(z); //where dict hold all the words in the dictionary
Matcher m = p.matcher(str);
if(m.matches()){
System.out.println(str);
System.out.println(strToCompare);
// System.out.println(buff);
If I run the method where my parameter = 12, I am given the following output.
aestheticism
aestheti.is.
demographics
de.o.ra.....
Which suggests that the method is working correctly.
However, after running for a short time, the method cuts and gives me the error:
PatternSyntaxException:
Null(in java.util.regex.Pattern).
Does anyone know why this would occur?