How to check if a string contains a substring containing spaces?

Question

Say I have a string like this in java:

\"this is {my string: } ok\"

Note, there can be any number of white spaces in between the various characters. How do I

Answer 1

The easiest thing to do is to strip all the spaces from both strings.

return stringToSearch.replaceAll("\s", "").contains(
  stringToFind.replaceAll("\s", ""));

Answer 2

For this purpose you need to use String#contains(CharSequence).

Note, there can be any number of white spaces in between the various characters.

For this purpose String#trim() method is used to returns a copy of the string, with leading and trailing whitespace omitted.

For e.g.:

String myStr = "this is {my string: } ok";
if (myStr.trim().contains("{my string: }")) {
    //Do something.
} 

Answer 3

If you are looking to see if a String contains another specific sequence of characters then you could do something like this :

String stringToTest = "blah blah blah";

if(stringToTest.contains("blah")){
    return true;
}

You could also use matches. For a decent explanation on matching Strings I would advise you check out the Java Oracle tutorials for Regular Expressions at :

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/regex/index.html

Cheers,

Jamie

Answer 4

Look for the regex

\{\s*my\s+string:\s*\}

This matches any sequence that contains

1. A left brace
2. Zero or more spaces
3. 'my'
4. One or more spaces
5. 'string:'
6. Zero or more spaces
7. A right brace

Where 'space' here means any whitespace (tab, space, newline, cr)

Answer 5

If you have any number of white space between each character of your matching string, I think you are better off removing all white spaces from the string you are trying to match before the search. I.e. :

String searchedString = "this is {my string: } ok";
String stringToMatch = "{my string: }";
boolean foundMatch = searchedString.replaceAll(" ", "").contains(stringToMatch.replaceAll(" ",""));

Answer 6

Put it all into a string variable, say s, then do s.contains("{my string: }); this will return true if {my string: } is in s.