Maybe you have a solution to this problem...

Question

I've been trying to think of a few ways of performing this task and I can't think of a solution I'm satisfied with.
Here's what's going on...
I have a static method that affects a JTextComponent. It adds a listener and modifies certain areas of text as needed with each key typed. Let's say, for example, that the listener looks for the words "Hello" and "Hi." If it finds "Hello" it converts it to "Hi" and if it finds "Hi" it converts it to "Hello." So someone tries to type "Hello World." After the user is done typing the "Hello" part is converts it to "Hi." Then as s/he keeps typing it will keep converting it back and forth between "Hello" and "Hi." What I want to do is make a set of tags that indicate what's done and what's not. Let's pretend to do it with html-type tags.
So after it converts the word once I would make the text "<converted>Hi</converted> World". Then when it's doing the conversion next key typed it will ignore what's in the tags. The problem is that I can't have the user see the tags.
I considered making it a subclass of JTextComponent and adding a variable that contains the coded message but that doesn't really fit with the rest of my program. Since this is static I don't have somewhere to store the data for the potentially hundreds of JTextComponents that will be affected. Another idea was to use the component's name field to hold the data but I can't guarantee its data and I may overwrite a name that another piece of the program depends on.
One last thought I was thinking is to divide the text using a character that doesn't display. Unfortunately I don't know of any such character and I think the component would try to display something anyway.
I'm sure I was pretty confusing so if you need some clarifying let me know.
Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Thanks for your response bbritta but perhaps I wasn't clear that that example was pretty basic compared to what I'm doing.
I figured my exact specification would get in the way but I may as well just tell you exactly what I'm doing. The program converts text from our alphabet to another (namely hiragana and katakana). The problem I'm running in to is that I want to be able to switch "modes." As it stands if you're holding left shift it will convert into hiragana. If you're holding the right shift it will convert into katakana. If you're holding nothing down it won't convert it (leaving you with the romaji). The problem comes because when it's told to translate into a certain alphabet it converts the entire text. I need to be able to mark off different locations in the string so that it knows what to convert and what not to.
Does this make it any more clear?