Text Normalizer - Dealing with ascents

I had to sort French texts in alphabetical order. It was not as simple as we compare English strings because we must deal with the French ascents such as é and à.

If we don't process anything and use the simple string comparison function, we get équipement after zebra. However, we need équipement between words starting from 'd' and 'f' i.e. we want  équipement as if it were equipement. In order to solve the problem, we must compare strings after we normalize and remove Diacritic:

String normalizedStr1=Normalizer.normalize(Text1, Normalizer.Form.NFD).replaceAll("[\u0300-\u036F]", "");

String normalizedStr2=Normalizer.normalize(Text2, Normalizer.Form.NFD).replaceAll("[\u0300-\u036F]", "");

Now we make comparison between normalizedStr1 and normalizedStr2 instead of Text1 and Text2.

TPTP - A Java Profiling Tool

In software engineering, program profiling, software profiling or simply profiling, a form of dynamic program analysis (as opposed to static code analysis), is the investigation of a program's behavior using information gathered as the program executes. The usual purpose of this analysis is to determine which sections of a program to optimize - to increase its overall speed, decrease its memory requirement or sometimes both.

The set of profiling tools provides software developers or testers with the ability to analyze the performance of a Java program or to gain a comprehensive understanding of the overall performance of an application. Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) is such a tool used for profiling. A good tutorial is here: Tutorial.

Finding 'a word' using Regular Expression

We frequently need to test where a word (rather than pattern) exists in other string or not. To illustrate more, consider the following two strings:

String1: This fact is very important to understand.
String2: port

Now  two interesting cases arise:

• Find whether pattern "port" appears in String1: In this case the regular expression would be: String regExp=".*"+ String2 +".*"; Clearly, we don't care what comes before and after the pattern. It would be true because port pattern in there in String1 (the word important contains it)
  
• Find whether a word "port" appears in String1. Regular expression in this case is : String regExp=".*\\b"+ String2 +"\\b.*"; Following Java code is used to test this:
  

String regExp=".*\\b"+String2+"\\b.*";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regExp);
Matcher m = p.matcher(String1);
if( m.matches())
{

}

It fails here because "port" as a word doesn't appear in String1. It just appears as a pattern. If String1="The port was far" then the pattern matches because port appears as a word.

Key role is played by the \b of regular expression which is used to find word in a string.

Java Reflection

Java's Reflection API's makes it possible to inspect classes, interfaces, fields and methods at runtime, without knowing the names of the classes, methods etc. at compile time. It is also possible to instantiate new objects, invoke methods and get/set field values using reflection.

References:

1. Tutorials at jenkov.com
   

Properties in Java

Properties are configuration values managed as key/value pairs. In each pair, the key and value are both String values. The key identifies, and is used to retrieve, the value, much as a variable name is used to retrieve the variable's value. For example, an application capable of downloading files might use a property named "download.lastDirectory" to keep track of the directory used for the last download.

To manage properties, create instances of java.util.Properties. This class provides methods for the following:

• loading key/value pairs into a Properties object from a stream,
• retrieving a value from its key,
• listing the keys and their values,
• enumerating over the keys, and
• saving the properties to a stream.

References:

1. Properties in JAVA