To find the largest sentence in a .txt file using Java

To find the largest sentence in a “.txt” file using Java involves reading the contents of the file, splitting the contents into sentences and comparing the lengths of the sentences to find the largest one.

Finding the largest sentence in a .txt file

Implementation:

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class LargestSentenceFinder {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String filePath = "path/to/your/file.txt";
        try {
            String largestSentence = findLargestSentence(filePath);
            System.out.println("The largest sentence is:\n" + largestSentence);
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
    public static String findLargestSentence(String filePath) throws IOException {
        StringBuilder fileContent = new StringBuilder();        
        try (BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(filePath))) {
            String line;
            while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                fileContent.append(line).append(" ");
            }
        }
        String[] sentences = fileContent.toString().split("(?<=[.!?])\\s+");
        String largestSentence = "";
        for (String sentence : sentences) {
            if (sentence.length() > largestSentence.length()) {
                largestSentence = sentence;
            }
        }
        return largestSentence.trim();
    }
}

Explanation:

1.Reading the file:

• Use “BufferedReader” and “FileReader” to read the contents of a “a.txt” line by line.
• Append each line to a “StringBuilder” to form the complete text.

2.Splitting the Text into sentences:

• Use a regular expression “(?<=[.!?]\\s+” to split the text into sentences. This regex splits the text into sentences. This regex splits the text at each punctuation mark(.,!, or ?) followed by one or more whitespaces characters.

3.Finding the Largest Sentence:

• Iterate over the array of sentences.
• keep track of the largest sentence encountered so far.

4.Handling Exceptions:

• Use a try-with-resources statement to ensure the file reader is closed properly.
• Catch and print any ‘IoException’ that might occur during file reading.

Input and Output:
Consider the input as:
This is the first sentence. This is the second sentence, which is a bit longer than the first one! Here is the third sentence? Finally, we have the fourth sentence, which is the longest sentence in this example file.
Then the output looks as:
The largest sentence is:
Finally, we have the fourth sentence, which is the longest sentence in this example file.