how to define the occurance of a word in a text?

Hi all,I need that code badly,I have a text'.txt'.I have chosen two words"are" and "the" which are repeated along the text so I need a code to read the text and if the word "are" comes put "1" and if the word "the" comes put "0" sequentially so a series of binary digits"x" is formed. for example x=1 0 0 1 1 1 1 0 that means "are" occurs first then "the"occurs twice then"are" four times then"the" and so on until the text ends.thanks

[Walter Roberson]

What if the text includes "then" or "hare"?

[jojototo]

If the word is a part from another word ignore it ,I don't want it. I want only the words "are" and "the" independently

[Walter Roberson]

Suppose there is "the-3" or "the-ory" ? The first of those is clearly a use of the word "the", but the second of those might be indicating hyphenation of "theory" and you have indicated you would not want that. How about "7are" ? Or "the.9" compared to "the. " ?

Rules! We need rules! What characters can possibly occur immediately before one of these words but the word would still be counted, and what characters can possibly occur immediately after the word but the word would still be counted? Does "The" count? Does "tHe" count?

[jojototo]

Thanks for your reply, The only character which can occur immediately before or after one of these words and the word is counted is 'space'. And yes "The" is counted because the word might be in the beginning of the sentence so the first character is capital,but "tHe" or"thE" aren't counted.

[Walter Roberson]

So not counted if there is a comma, period, exclamation mark, colon, semi-colon, apostrophe or double quote or other quote marks?

[jojototo]

Oh my god,I didn't think about all these possibilities .You're absolutely right all these are counted of course.

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

whichone = strcmp('and', lower(regexp(str, '(?<=^| )(([tT]he)|([aA]nd))(?=$| )', 'match')));

whichone is 1 for each occurrence of 'and' and 0 for each occurrence of 'the'

[Walter Roberson]

whichone = strcmp('and', lower(regexp(str, '(?<=^|["'' ])(([tT]he)|([aA]nd))(?=$|[,.!:;"'' ])', 'match')));

with this modification, space or " or ' are permitted before the word, and comma or period or exclamation mark or colon or semi-colon or " or ' or space are permitted after the word. But not, for example, colon immediately before the word as that does not occur in English.

I did not try to put in the "smart quotes"

[jojototo]

Thanks, it works but if I changed the search word ,I have a problem.I wrote a text where the word "the" is repeated 20 times ,I added an extra space in addition to the usual space between words ,using keyboard,after 12 word of them .then when I tried the code to put 1 for the occurance of the word "the"which has extra space after it and the word "the "which has only the usual space after it,it doesn't work .please help me I need this code badly.

[Walter Roberson]

Break it up into pieces.

thes = regexp(str, '(?<=^|["'' ])([tT]he ?)(?=$|[,.!:;"'' ])');

this finds "the" or "The" that are preceded by beginning of line or by a space or double quote or apostrophe, and which might be followed by a space, and after that followed by a comma, period, exclamation mark, colon, semi-colon, double-quote, apostrophe, or space. The "the" or "The" and the possible space are extracted, but not what follows that.

Once you have these, you can tell the cases apart by various ways, including comparing the last character to a space, or just looking at the length:

cellfun(@length, thes)

length 3 has no space after it, length 4 had a space after it.

Unfortunately, though, you have an ambiguous situation. At the end of the line, you cannot tell whether "the" followed by space followed by end of line is the "normal" case or the "extra space" case. This code will detect it as if it is the "extra space" case, but that is arguably wrong: it could instead be a "normal space" that happens to be followed by nothing.

As I wrote before, "Rules! We need rules!" -- and those rules need to define what the "correct" outcome is in each potentially ambiguous situation.

[jojototo]

Thanks a lot