Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition [Electronic resources]

This class determines character, word, sentence, and line breaks in a block of text in a way that is independent of locale and text encoding. As an abstract class, BreakIterator cannot be instantiated directly. Instead, you must use one of the class methods getCharacterInstance( ), getWordInstance( ), getSentenceInstance( ), or getLineInstance( ) to return an instance of a nonabstract subclass of BreakIterator. These various factory methods return a BreakIterator object that is configured to locate the requested boundary types and is localized to work for the optionally specified locale.

Once you have obtained an appropriate BreakIterator object, use setText( ) to specify the text in which to locate boundaries. To locate boundaries in a Java String object, simply specify the string. To locate boundaries in text that uses some other encoding, you must specify a CharacterIterator object for that text so that the BreakIterator object can locate the individual characters of the text. Having set the text to be searched, you can determine the character positions of characters, words, sentences, or line breaks with the first( ), last( ), next( ), previous( ), current( ), and following( ) methods, which perform the obvious functions. Note that these methods do not return text itself, but merely the position of the appropriate word, sentence, or line break.

public abstract class 
BreakIterator  implements Cloneable {
// Protected Constructors
protected 
BreakIterator ( );  
// Public Constants
public static final int 
DONE ;                                       =-1
// Public Class Methods
public static java.util.Locale[ ] 
getAvailableLocales ( );     synchronized
public static BreakIterator 
getCharacterInstance ( );  
public static BreakIterator 
getCharacterInstance (java.util.Locale 
where );  
public static BreakIterator 
getLineInstance ( );  
public static BreakIterator 
getLineInstance (java.util.Locale 
where );  
public static BreakIterator 
getSentenceInstance ( );  
public static BreakIterator 
getSentenceInstance (java.util.Locale 
where );  
public static BreakIterator 
getWordInstance ( );  
public static BreakIterator 
getWordInstance (java.util.Locale 
where );  
// Protected Class Methods
5.0   protected static int 
getInt (byte[ ] 
buf , int 
offset );  
5.0   protected static long 
getLong (byte[ ] 
buf , int 
offset );  
5.0   protected static short 
getShort (byte[ ] 
buf , int 
offset );  
// Public Instance Methods
public abstract int 
current ( );  
public abstract int 
first ( );  
public abstract int 
following (int 
offset );  
public abstract CharacterIterator 
getText ( );  
1.2   public boolean 
isBoundary (int 
offset );  
public abstract int 
last ( );  
public abstract int 
next ( );  
public abstract int 
next (int 
n );  
1.2   public int 
preceding (int 
offset );  
public abstract int 
previous ( );  
public void 
setText (String 
newText );  
public abstract void 
setText (CharacterIterator 
newText );  
// Public Methods Overriding Object
public Object 
clone ( );  
}