Regex replaceAll question

I am using replaceAll to replace a bunch of "tags" with content for this bit of software that I am porting (from something else) that creates documents (in the end) by populating templates with data.
Here's my problem. The "tags" are all okay (not giving any regex content) but some of the data is. Because at first now I hit data that as a String has some regex funky characters in it. And regex got all all whiny about that because there aren't any matching groups. Well no. That's true.
So I have to escape the $. But it occurs to me that I could well have more than this problem with other bits of content (including some parts I haven't gotten to yet) and I am wondering if there is any sort of easy solution. Is there way to tell replaceAll that the replacement String is a "literal" replacement i.e. I don't want any regex parsing at all just replace the found "tag" with the "content", that's it.
Some sort of escape the whole sequence? Possibly. But I don't understand what it would be. \ is just for as single character?
So any quick solution? Or alternative?
BTW I am stuck with 1.4 on this project.

yawmark wrote:
I'd recommend trying Apache Commons StringUtils.
Hope this message doesn't disappear into the aether.
~I think it did for awhile but like Lazarus arose...
Anyway thank you for the effort.
This is an interesting suggestion but I'd rather not go the route of adding more libraries.
What I did at first was
private void replaceAll(StringBuffer buff, String toFind, String toReplace){
while(buff.indexOf(toFind)>-1){
buff.replace(buff.indexOf(toFind),buff.indexOf(toFind)+toFind.length(),toReplace);
}which worked good enough for me but someone else pointed out quoteReplacement and just doing my own version of that. Which works well too.
Anyway thanks again I do appreciate it what with the current situation and all.

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Hi,
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thanks,
bp

Just guessing, but maybe...
Pattern.compile("(?i)<element lev1>*<title>([^<]*)</title>");
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I need to extract the link and the links anchor text from Strings which take the following format:
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Or
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Hello,
i'm using the following to replace two characters from my input string
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tr = str.replaceAll("a", "bc").replaceAll("x","yz");If the OP needs something more sophisticated than this then he should look at
http://elliotth.blogspot.com/2004/07/java-implementation-of-rubys-gsub.html

Regex related question

m'kay
i've got a problem, i need to create a regex to check if string S contains at least X patterns P
i produced this code to test my regex's, you may use it as well to see if you're on right track...
// works with JDK 1.4 or better
public class RegexTest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
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import java.util.regex.*;
public class test3
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I'm trying to create a regex that will not match something. What I mean is if I have the string "this" I want everything but "this" to match the regex.
"not this" == Match
"something" == Match
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"hist" == Match.
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-- Steve

Note that that regex will also match an empty string. If you want to require at least one character, add a bit: Pattern.compile("^(?!this$).+");Or, to require at least one non-whitespace character: Pattern.compile("^(?!this$)\\S.*");

Using RegEx in Subscription Criteria

Using RegEx in Subscription Criteria
Hello
I want to use RegEx expression for filtering in my Subscription criteria, as follows:
Let say all the monitor I created start with same set of characters i.e.
"My Monitor"
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My Monitor 123
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The following blog has some detailed information
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I am not clear if this would work in my case, for example it states the ^ character is used to denote NOT. Based on this I was thinking about changing the above
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Ernie

Hello Yury,
Thanks again for your help. Your solution worked, however with a slight difference as I discovered something else while testing.
Basically the example above
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My Monitor ABC - pass
My Monitor 123 - no pass
My Monitor XYZ - pass
My Monitor 222 - pass
My Monitor XY3 - pass
I therefore had to add an _ as part of the filter meaning one character, therefore using the above example if I want to block
My Monitor 123
My filter would be as follows
My Monitor [^1][^_2][^__3]%
i.e. 1 being the first character, 2 being the second character by placing any single character in front of it using the _ then 3 being the third character by placing and two characters
in from of it by using two _ characters i.e. __
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r9973 wrote:
Sorry, more like: String test = "Some Text Here"Want to convert to String test = "Some Text Here"
Post the code that you used to test the regex. I just tried it and it worked fine for me. All you need to do is apply the regex replaceall to your string variable that holds the string
String test = "Some Text Here";
test = test.replaceAll(" +", " ");
System.out.println(test);And thats it.

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Somebody can to indicate books about Regular Expression in Oracle ?
Thanks

Regex tag of Blog of Volder.
http://volder-notes.blogspot.com/search/label/Regular%20Expressions
This entry mentions my regex solution :-)
http://volder-notes.blogspot.com/2007/10/removing-duplicate-elements-from-string.html
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http://www.geocities.jp/oraclesqlpuzzle/regex/
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http://www.geocities.jp/oraclesqlpuzzle/regex/regex-2-1.html
http://www.geocities.jp/oraclesqlpuzzle/regex/regex-3-5.html
http://www.geocities.jp/oraclesqlpuzzle/regex/regex-4-4.html

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r9973 wrote:
Sorry, more like: String test = "Some Text Here"Want to convert to String test = "Some Text Here"
Post the code that you used to test the regex. I just tried it and it worked fine for me. All you need to do is apply the regex replaceall to your string variable that holds the string
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test = test.replaceAll(" +", " ");
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While this works..
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I've scoured Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions to no avail.Did you look on page 209? In the book, that code sample is labelled "Building Up a Regex Through Variables in Java". That should have been a clue. ^_^
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Hi,
I have a question regarding the regular expressions in java.
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for (int i = 1; i <= matcher.groupCount(); i++)
}

It's not top secret, the time difference is the problem.
It's for a school project. We have to make Pascal Compiler and the first step is the Lexical Analyzer. This means that I have some regular expressions for identifiers, numeric constants, string constants and so on...
For example the regex for the identifiers (variable name) looks like: "[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*", but the one for the key words is basically an array, like the one in my first post.
The regular expressions work fine, but for the next part of the project I need to know the index of the key words, within the key word array (which in my case is a regular expression). So this is why I was wondering if there is any way to get the group number, without having to iterate through the whole regex.

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Hi,
I'm getting into java.util.regex lately. Having used Perl for regex I'm trying to get familiar with Java's regex "spirit".
Concerning replacement we can use replaceAll or replaceFirst however:
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- what if I want to replace second to fourth element?
in PERL we use " regex_epression_here for 2..4;" for instance.
I you would have some interesting website/tutorials related to JAVA regex that would be great.
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Rgds,
SR

Yep,
here is a sample of replacement in Perl
$Line =~ s/\]/|/ for 2..4; #Replace 2nd 'til
4th delimiter (]) with pipe (|)
....Based on the reference I gave earlier
import java.util.regex.*;
* A rewriter does a global substitution in the strings passed to its
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* This class is supposed to be equivalent to Ruby's 'gsub' when given
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* @author Elliott Hughes
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Regex in String.replaceall()

I wanted to remove ewg text from following lines completely.
ewg#First line
ewg#Second line
ewgThird line
For this i have used String class replace all method as follows:
StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(returnString.replaceAll("(?i)\\bentfw\\b",""));The problem is this code is replacing only first two lines not the third line. Please help me

returnString.replaceFirst("(?i)^ewg","")i tried this but its not removing ewg at allSeems to work just fine for me:
String[] lines = new String[]{"ewg#First line",
"ewg#Second line", "ewgThird line", "a line not
starting with ewg"};
String regex = "(?i)^ewg";
for (String line : lines) {
System.out.println(line.replaceFirst(regex, ""));
sorry for long delay reply.
i still couldnt solve this problem.
i am not using any string array but a single string that separates these three lines with \n

Regex replaceAll question

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