I'm trying to look through strings for given keywords, but in some cases, the keywords are contained within other words, resulting in a false-positive. I'm sure the answer to this is regex, I'm just not sure the correct way to implement it. Here's an example of what's happening.
val keyword = "NFL"
val someCompareString = "This week in the NFL something is happening."
val someOtherCompareString = "In the middle east there is an ongoing conflict of some kind."
// I expect this to return TRUE
if (someCompareString.lowercase().contains(keyword))
// I expect this to return FALSE
if (someOtherCompareString.lowercase().contains(keyword))
The second string is returning "true", because the word "conflict" does contain "nfl". I understand what's happening, but without doing something goofy to the string like taking keyword and adding a space/comma/exclamation/period both before and after and then checking all of those possible combinations... I'm not sure what the correct way to handle this is. Anyone have any advice?
The key is to look for whole words, which can be done by using word boundaries (\b) in your regex.
// Create a regex pattern with word boundaries
val pattern = val pattern = "\\b$keyword\\b".toRegex(RegexOption.IGNORE_CASE)
// Check for matches
println(pattern.containsMatchIn(someCompareString)) // Expected: true
println(pattern.containsMatchIn(someOtherCompareString)) // Expected: false