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Java Explanation of Regular Expression Meta Character "\w"

Subexpression/The meta-character " \ w Matches with word characters, that is, a to z and A to Z as well as 0 to9.

Example1

import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class RegexExample {
   public static void main( String args[] ) {
      String regex = "\\w to";
      String input = "Hello how are you welcome to w"3codebox";
      Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex);
      Matcher m = p.matcher(input);
      int count = 0;
      while(m.find()) {
         count++;
      }
      System.out.println("Number of matches: ")+count);
   }
}

Output Result

Number of matches: 1

Example2

The following example reads5Values of strings and print values containing word characters-

import java.util.Scanner;
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class MatchWordCharacters {
   public static void main( String args[] ) {
      String regex = "\\w.*$";
      Scanner sc = new Scanner(System.in);
      System.out.println("Enter 5 input strings: ");
      String input[] = new String[5];
      for (int i=0; i<5; i++) {
         input[i] = sc.nextLine();
      }
      //Create a Pattern object
      Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex);
      System.out.println("Strings that contain word characters: ");
      for(int i=0; i<5;i++) {
         //Create a Matcher object
         Matcher m = p.matcher(input[i]);
         if(m.matches()) {
            System.out.println(m.group());
         }
      }
   }
}

Output Result

Enter 5 input strings:
sample
test
test23
hello##
#$%&&
Strings that contain word characters:
sample
test
test23
hello##