Find whole words without regex

Issue

I need to find whole words in a sentence, but without using regular expressions. So if I wanted to find the word "the" in this sentence: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", I'm currently using:

 String text = "the, quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
 String keyword = "the";

 Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("\\b"+keyword+"\\b").matcher(text);
 Boolean contains = matcher.find();

but if I used:

Boolean contains = text.contains(keyword);

and pad the keyword with a space, it won't find the first "the" in the sentence, both because it doesn't have surround whitespaces and the punctuations.

To be clear, I'm building an Android app, and I'm getting memory leaks and it might be because I'm using a regular-expression in a ListView, so it's performing a regular-expression match X number of times, depending on the items in the Listview.

Solution

public int findWholeWorld(final String text, final String searchString) {
    return (" " + text + " ").indexOf(" " + searchString + " ");
}

This will give you the index of the first occurrence of the word "the" or -1 if the word "the" doesn't exist.

Answered By - Jack Edmonds