[solved]Finding any alpha numeric within a string.

My question is how do i find any letter or number within a string? Im trying to find a way to track anything that appears next to a "@"

if(event.getMessage().startsWith("@")){

instead of making a line for every letter and number how do i simply find them all within 1 line?

 

I would strongly recommend regular expressions to do this neatly.

PHP:

Pattern pat = Pattern.compile("^@\\w");
Matcher m = pat.matcher(event.getMessage());
if (m.matches()) {
  // ...
}


"^@\\w" means start at beginning of line ("^), then look for a literal "@", followed by any alphanumeric ("\\w"). Note the double backslash - that's because of Java's string quoting & escaping rules.

There's also String.matches(regex) which does basically the same thing, more concisely but not as flexible.

If you want to know just what alphanumeric follows the "@", it's only slightly more complex:

PHP:

Pattern pat = Pattern.compile("^@(\\w)");    // note the parentheses now
Matcher m = pat.matcher(event.getMessage());
if (m.find()) {
  String matched = m.group();
  // ...
}


This guide is useful: http://www.regular-expressions.info/java.html, along with http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/regex/.

 

thanks, ive been trying to figure out what those expressions meant for awhile now.