How to match only two words?

Question

How can I match only two words that are separated by one or more spaces?

[\w]+[\s]+[\w]+

matches:

one two
one two three //but this should not match as it countains more than 2 words

as I wrote above: the content `one two three` matches. It should not as I want to find out if there are only two (and always two!) words in the string. — membersound, Oct 23 '13 at 14:10
How are you using the regex? If using `matches()` method, then that should work fine. — Rohit Jain, Oct 23 '13 at 14:11
@RohitJain I suspect he's testing the regex out with a regex tester first. — Cruncher, Oct 23 '13 at 14:14
Related: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6298566/regex-match-whole-string — Cruncher, Oct 23 '13 at 14:14
http://java-regex-tester.appspot.com/ using "one two three" as target text, and "[\w]+[\s]+[\w]+" as regex, matches comes up false. — Cruncher, Oct 23 '13 at 14:15
@membersound java is different. Matches has to match the entire string, not just part of it. To match part of it you would use "find". — Cruncher, Oct 23 '13 at 14:19
Probably there was an intention why I asked for regex inspite of doing a java split. And indeed, I'd like to use it inside a hibernate validation annotation. But as it does not matter for the question itself, I ommited this information. — membersound, Oct 23 '13 at 14:56

score 5 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

5

You can use this regex with line start and end anchors :

^\\s*\\w+\\s+\\w+\\s*$

Note use of ^ and $ that makes sure only two word string, separated by space is matched.

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

answered Oct 23 '13 at 14:09

anubhava

how could I add optional spaces in front and behind the two words? – membersound Oct 23 '13 at 14:11
@membersound: Check the update for matching optional spaces on either side. – anubhava Oct 23 '13 at 14:12

1 Answers1