Why does this regular expression not return the second word

Question

I have the following regex expression (code below), however I am very confused as to why it does not return 'Banas' since it is a word and is between 2 and 20 characters.

    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\s[A-Za-z]{2,20}\\s");
    Matcher m = p.matcher(" Derek Banas CA 1234 PA (750)555-1234");

    while(m.find()){
    System.out.println(m.group());
    }

The output is below. Why is "Banas" not in the output? Thanks.

Derek CA PA

Answer 1

Because first match consumed space after Derek so Banas cant use it at start. Try maybe changing your regex to "\\b[A-Za-z]{2,20}\\b". \\b is word boundary which will match only places that are

• before the first character in the string, if the first character is a word character.
• after the last character in the string, if the last character is a word character.
• between two characters in the string, where one is a word character and the other is not a word character.