Substring replacement

Question

Hello,
i have a String like this one:
String input="someText 'dothis' anotherText 'second \'Command\' is easy' itgoeson "
and a method
public String handle(String str){
What i want now is to replace input with
String newInput="someText "+handle(dothis)+" anotherText "+handle(second 'Command' is easy)+" itgoeson ";
So how do i handle escaped characters in a fast way ? Is there a way to use a RegEx ?
Thanks for help,
winny

Answer 1

winny wrote:
ok, next try, sorry for my bad explanation.
I have a String str and want to replace all tags with the result of the handle-method invoked by the string.
so for one tag do
String tmp=handle(tag[0]);
str=str.replace(tag[0],tmp);i thought that there might be a way of using RegEx to detect all tags. Because then i just have to invoke the handle method with this tag and replace the tag with the result of the method in the original stringI gues you want something like this:
import java.util.regex.*;
public class Main {
    private static int x = 1;
    private static String handle(String str){
        return String.valueOf(x++);
    public static String process(String input){
        Pattern p = Pattern.compile("'.*?[^\\\\]'");
        Matcher m = p.matcher(input);
        while(m.find()) {
            String temp = m.group();
            input = input.replaceFirst("\\Q"+temp, handle(temp));
            m = p.matcher(input);
        return input;
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String input = "someText 'dothis' anotherText 'second \\'Command\\' is easy' itgoeson";
        System.out.println(input);
        System.out.println(process(input));
}