Find word containing punctuation, but not in the end or word

Question

I'm breaking my head about following problem. I need to match dot in the word under certain condition.

Example:

D.A.R.Y.L. or se.ven or go/the    will be untreated.
Dr. Odissey. or look, or look:    will be treated. 

I was using before:

([A-Z]+[.\\-/]+)+([A-Z]+[.\\-/]?)*

It was partially working, but it wouldn't distinguish for Dr. Odissey. and so on.

Answer 1

Try this pattern in Java style:

(?<!\\S)[A-Za-z]+\\p{Punct}(?!\\S)

you can replace \\p{Punct} with the punctuation characters of your choice [.,:;]

Answer 2

If you are looking for words optionally ending with punctuation you can use

\b[a-zA-Z]+\p{P}?(?=\s|$)

\b is a non word boundary

\p{P} matches any punctuation character

(?=\s|$) would check for a space or end of string

Answer 3

It seems (?) that you want to match/replace a dot if (and only if) it's followed by whitespace or the end of the string. Is that correct?

In that case, assuming you want to change dots into exlamation marks,

newString = oldString.replaceAll("(?<=^|\\s)(\\w+)\\.(?=\\s|$)", "$1!");

will change

D.A.R.Y.L. or se.ven or go/the Dr. Odissey. or look, or look:

into

D.A.R.Y.L. or se.ven or go/the Dr! Odissey! or look, or look:

Answer 4

If you're only looking to find the dots inside a word then you can use this

\b[.]\b

Edit live on Debuggex

Or if you're only looking for dots at the end of words, then try this

\b[.](?:\s|$)|(?:^|\s)[.]\b

Edit live on Debuggex

Of course this will match the . after D.A.R.Y.L.