All Implemented Interfaces:

Cloneable

public abstract class BreakIterator extends Object implements Cloneable

Implementation Requirements:

The default implementation of the character boundary analysis conforms to the Unicode Consortium's Extended Grapheme Cluster breaks. For more detail, refer to Grapheme Cluster Boundaries section in the Unicode Standard Annex #29.

The BreakIterator instances returned by the factory methods of this class are intended for use with natural languages only, not for programming language text. It is however possible to define subclasses that tokenize a programming language.

Examples:

Creating and using text boundaries:

Copy

public static void main(String args[]) {
     if (args.length == 1) {
         String stringToExamine = args[0];
         //print each word in order
         BreakIterator boundary = BreakIterator.getWordInstance();
         boundary.setText(stringToExamine);
         printEachForward(boundary, stringToExamine);
         //print each sentence in reverse order
         boundary = BreakIterator.getSentenceInstance(Locale.US);
         boundary.setText(stringToExamine);
         printEachBackward(boundary, stringToExamine);
         printFirst(boundary, stringToExamine);
         printLast(boundary, stringToExamine);
     }
}

Print each element in order:

Copy

public static void printEachForward(BreakIterator boundary, String source) {
    int start = boundary.first();
    for (int end = boundary.next();
         end != BreakIterator.DONE;
         start = end, end = boundary.next()) {
         System.out.println(source.substring(start,end));
    }
}

Print each element in reverse order:

Copy

public static void printEachBackward(BreakIterator boundary, String source) {
    int end = boundary.last();
    for (int start = boundary.previous();
         start != BreakIterator.DONE;
         end = start, start = boundary.previous()) {
        System.out.println(source.substring(start,end));
    }
}

Print first element:

Copy

public static void printFirst(BreakIterator boundary, String source) {
    int start = boundary.first();
    int end = boundary.next();
    System.out.println(source.substring(start,end));
}

Print last element:

Copy

public static void printLast(BreakIterator boundary, String source) {
    int end = boundary.last();
    int start = boundary.previous();
    System.out.println(source.substring(start,end));
}

Print the element at a specified position:

Copy

public static void printAt(BreakIterator boundary, int pos, String source) {
    int end = boundary.following(pos);
    int start = boundary.previous();
    System.out.println(source.substring(start,end));
}

Find the next word:

Copy

public static int nextWordStartAfter(int pos, String text) {
    BreakIterator wb = BreakIterator.getWordInstance();
    wb.setText(text);
    int last = wb.following(pos);
    int current = wb.next();
    while (current != BreakIterator.DONE) {
        for (int p = last; p < current; p++) {
            if (Character.isLetter(text.codePointAt(p)))
                return last;
        }
        last = current;
        current = wb.next();
    }
    return BreakIterator.DONE;
}

(The iterator returned by BreakIterator.getWordInstance() is unique in that the break positions it returns don't represent both the start and end of the thing being iterated over. That is, a sentence-break iterator returns breaks that each represent the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next. With the word-break iterator, the characters between two boundaries might be a word, or they might be the punctuation or whitespace between two words. The above code uses a simple heuristic to determine which boundary is the beginning of a word: If the characters between this boundary and the next boundary include at least one letter (this can be an alphabetical letter, a CJK ideograph, a Hangul syllable, a Kana character, etc.), then the text between this boundary and the next is a word; otherwise, it's the material between words.)

Since:

1.1

See Also:

• CharacterIterator