请建议我一个合适的Java数据类型

Question

I have a not so difficult question to ask and i wonder if anyone could help me out..

I have a string object similar to " Hello i am a human being " that i extracted using Tess4J. Next im trying to find out if each word in this sentence is bold, italic or underlined

afterwards i require this information to be returned from the method along with the source word. problem is i dont know a suitable datatype to do this operation.

can some one suggest me a good data-structure if possible ?

additional points

• there is a massive number of words in this
• words may or may not replicate

This is a sample structure -

"Hello" , true , false , false
"Hi", false , false , false
"Hi", true, true, false

Any assistance is greatly appreciated, Thank you, Sumal.

Answer 1

Simply write your own class. Something like this:

public class FormattedText {
    private String text;
    private boolean bold;
    private boolean italic;
    private boolean underlined;

    // setter and getter
}

Answer 2

I'm not sure why comments and answers suggest certain fields . Usually, when creating a class, one should rather focus on the interface .

Particularly, referring to the point

there is a massive number of words in this

one should consider that the fields do not matter, and the three boolean fields can be condensed into a single int field - roughly like this:

class FormattedText {
    private String string;
    private int style;

    private static final int PLAIN = 0;
    private static final int BOLD = 1;
    private static final int ITALIC = 2;
    private static final int UNDERLINED = 4;

    FormattedText(String string, boolean bold, boolean italic, boolean underlined)
    {
        this.string = string; 
        if (bold) style |= BOLD;
        if (italic) style |= ITALIC;
        if (underlined) style |= UNDERLINED;
    }


    public String getString() {
        return string;
    }

    public boolean isBold() {
        return (style & BOLD) != 0;
    }

    public boolean isItalic() {
        return (style & ITALIC) != 0;
    }

    public boolean isUnderlined() {
        return (style & UNDERLINED) != 0;
    }   
}

One could even "compress" this further. If you really have to handle a massive amount of these entries, and depending on whether/how this information can change, you could consider a dedicated data structure that stores the information about all words in dedicated BitSet s, for example.

Answer 3

An alternative custom-class approach which tries to avoid multiple boolean flags by using an EnumSet (or Guava's Sets.immutableEnumSet() ).

public class FormattedText {
    private final String text;
    private final Set<TextProperty> properties;

    public FormattedText(String text, TextProperty... properties) {
        this(text, EnumSet.copyOf(Arrays.asList(properties)));
    }

    public FormattedText(String text, Set<TextProperty> properties) {
        this.text = text;
        this.properties = properties;
    }

    // additional constructors, getters, logic
}

public enum TextProperty {
    BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINED;
}

Used like this:

new FormattedText("Hello", TextProperty.BOLD);

This way, you only have a single field containing all the necessary properties and methods to act on them. You can easily add new properties (strikethrough, superscript, etc.?) by amending the enum and you won't need a million fields with a million if-else blocks.

---

Alternatively, you could even do this:

public class FormattedText {
    private final String text;
    private final Set<TextProperty> properties;

    // constructors, getters, logic
}

public interface TextProperty {
    // a marker interface
}

public enum StandardTextProperty implements TextProperty {
    BOLD, ITALIC, UNDERLINED;
}

This way, anyone could add new properties if you ever deployed your code as a library for someone else to use.