Detecting Text Boundaries
Applications that manipulate text
need to locate boundaries
within the text.
For example,
consider some of the common functions of a word processor:
highlighting a character, cutting a word, moving the cursor
to the next sentence, and word-wrapping at a line ending.
To perform each of these functions, the word processor
must be able to detect the logical boundaries in the text.
Fortunately, you don't have to write your own routines to perform
boundary analysis. Instead, you can take advantage
of the methods provided by the
BreakIterator
class.
This section
discusses the instantiation methods and
the imaginary cursor of the
BreakIterator class.
In this section you'll learn
about the difference between user and
Unicode characters,
and how to locate user characters
with a BreakIterator.
If your application needs to select or locate words within text,
you'll find it helpful to use a BreakIterator.
Determining sentence boundaries can be
problematic,
because of the ambiguous use of
sentence terminators in many written languages.
This section examines some of the problems
you may encounter, and how
the BreakIterator deals with them.
This section describes how to
locate potential line breaks
in a text string
with a BreakIterator.