regex - Finding whole word only in Java string search -

i'm running problem of finding searched pattern within larger pattern in java program. example, i'll try , find for loops, stumble upon formula. of suggestions i've found talk using regular expression searches

string regex = "\\b"+keyword+"\\b"; pattern pattern = pattern.compile(regex); matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(searchstring); 

or variant of this. issue i'm running i'm crawling through code, not book-like text there spaces on either side of every word. example, miss for(, find. there clever way find whole words only?

edit: suggestions. how cases in there keyword starts on first entry of string? example,

class vec { public:    ... }; 

where i'm searching class (or alternatively public). patterns suggested thanga, austin lee, npinti, , kai iskratsch not work in case. ideas?

in case, issue \b flag punctuation marks, white spaces , beginning or end of string. opening bracket not fall within of these categories, , omitted.

the easiest way fix replace "\\b"+keyword+"\\b" "[\\b(]"+keyword+"[\\b)]".

in regex syntax, square brackets denote set of regex engine attempt match character contains.

as per this previous question, seem \b , [\b] not same. whilst \b represents word boundary, [\b] represents backspace character. fix this, replace "\\b"+keyword+"\\b" "(\b|\()"+keyword+"(\b|\))".