Replacing all occurrences of characters in a string with one new character?

Question

Hi there,
I'm looking for a way that I could replace all occurrences of a set of specific characters with just one new character for each occurrence.
For example if I have a string which is "word1...word2.......word3....word4............word5" how would I be able to replace this with just one character such as ":" for each set of "." so that it would essentially appear like this "word1:word2:word3:word4:word5"
If I just use replace(".", ":") I am left with "word1:::word2:::::::word4::::word5::::::::::::"
So therefore I'm guessing this would require the use of replaceAll() maybe? but I'm not really very familiar with how regular expressions work and how this would be accomplished using them.
Any help would be greatly appreciated :) Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, but "." means any character, so ".\+" means "any character repeated more than once". If you just mean a full stop ("period" for you Americans :p) you should use "\.+" as your regular expression, but remember that for Java you need a '\' escape to recognise '\' as '\', so in code you'd actually type your regex as:
"\\.+"Here's an example of one way to do it:
import java.util.regex.Matcher;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;
public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
       String string = "example1.......example2...example3.....example4";
     Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\.+");
     Matcher stringMatcher = pattern.matcher(string);
     string = stringMatcher.replaceAll(":");
     System.out.println(string);
}Edited by: JohnGraham on Oct 24, 2008 5:19 AM
Edited by: JohnGraham on Oct 24, 2008 5:22 AM