Detect @mentions and @sequence @of @mentions with this fully tested library.
QuitNow!, our main application to help people quit smoking, has an inapp chat to create a beautiful community of ex-smokers. They like to mention each other in the chat, and sometimes, someone mentions lots of people. Everytime the app finds a mention, it creates a span to bold the mention. The bad news are that, sometimes, a message could include more than 10 or 20 mentions, and that's a lot of spans. In that case, the best thing to do is to join those 20 spans in only one, which improves the performance dramatically.
So, we needed a fast way to look for mentions and sequences of mentions. And here is it.
Time to introduce the library!
String text = "Hello! This is a great introduction to @MentionDetector!";
//With MentionDetector you can... well. You can detect mentions!
MentionDetector detector = new MentionDetector(text);
detector.hasMentions(); //Returns if the text has any mention
detector.getMentions(); //Returns a list with the mention to @MentionDetector
Mention mention = detector.getMentions().get(0); //If we get a mention, we could ask:
mention.start(); //Where the mention starts? At 39!
mention.end(); //Where the mention ends? At 55!
mention.username(); //What's the mentioned username? @MentionDetector
mention.usernameWithoutAtSymbol(); //And what's the actual username? MentionDetector
//In addition, you can also get the mention sequences.
detector.getSequences();
//A sequence is a list of mentions only separated by spaces. For example:
String fourMentions = "Hello! I love @trains @bananas @pizza and @sushi";
//In this case, "@trains @bananas @pizza" is one sequence, and "@sushi" is another one.
Sequence sequence = new MentionDetector(fourMentions).getSequences().get(0);
sequence.start(); //Where the sequence starts? At 14!
sequence.end(); //Where the sequence ends? At 37!
//Now, you can create one StyleSpan instead of three. And that's great for performance!We're using this library at QuitNow! to highlight when a user mentions to another one in a in-app chat. The thing is that users are crazy. They take the stability of the library to the next step. So, if you plan to detect mentions in a String generated by a human, don't hesitate to wrap it in a lovely try-catch. In addition, if you can open an issue everytime you find a pattern, we will reproduce it with a test and fix it. Or, if you feel confortable launching us a Pull Request with the test and the solution, it will be impressive!
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Get the latest .jar
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Grab via Gradle:
repositories { jcenter() }
compile 'com.fewlaps.mentiondetector:mention-detector:1.2.4'- Grab via Maven:
<repository>
<id>jcenter</id>
<url>http://jcenter.bintray.com</url>
</repository>
<dependency>
<groupId>com.fewlaps.mentiondetector</groupId>
<artifactId>mention-detector</artifactId>
<version>1.2.4</version>
</dependency>The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Fewlaps
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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
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