Replacing characters with Regex

Sometimes we need to replace a substring with another string. Java provides us with several convenient methods to do this, and regular expressions play an important role in this process.

The methods replaceFirst and replaceAll of a string

There are two strings methods for substring replacement:

• String replaceFirst(String regex, String replacement) replaces the first occurrence of regex in the string with replacement;

• String replaceAll(String regex, String replacement) replaces all occurrences of regex in the string with replacement;

where

• regex is a regular expression matching the substrings that are to be replaced;

• replacement is a string that will replace a substring matching the regex (it should be just a string, not a regex!).

Since strings are immutable objects, both methods return a new string with necessary modifications.

Be careful, the replace method performs a similar kind of operation but it does NOT support regular expressions.

Let's look at the examples below.

String digitRegex = "\\d"; // a regex to match a digit

String str = "ab73c80abc9"; // a string consisting of letters and digits

String result1 = str.replaceAll(digitRegex, "#"); // it replaces each digit with #

System.out.println(result1); // "ab##c##abc#"

String result2 = str.replaceFirst(digitRegex, "#"); // it replaces only the first digit with #

System.out.println(result2); // "ab#3c80abc9"

It is possible to use any regex as the first argument of these methods. The following example demonstrates how to replace all sequences of uppercase Latin letters in a string with a single dash character.

String regex = "[A-Z]+";

String str = "aBoeQNmDFEFu";

String result = str.replaceAll(regex, "-"); // "a-oe-m-u"

The Matcher class, however, has the same methods. Let's take a quick look at them.

The methods replaceFirst and replaceAll of a matcher

An object of Matcher also has two methods for replacing a substring found by means of a regular expression:

• Matcher replaceFirst(String replacement);

• Matcher replaceAll(String replacement).

The difference between string methods and these ones is that the Matcher's methods do not take regexes as their arguments: any Matcher object gets its regex when being initiated. See the example below.

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\d"); // a regex to match a digit

String str = "ab73c80abc9"; // a string consisting of letters and digits

Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(str);

System.out.println(matcher.replaceAll("#"));   // ab##c##abc#
System.out.println(matcher.replaceFirst("#")); // ab#3c80abc9

As you can see, the replacement works quite simple, the main goal is to write a correct regular expression.

Conclusions

In this topic, we've learned:

• we can replace a substring with any other string by means of replaceFirst and replaceAll methods belonging either to String objects or Matcher objects;

• string methods accept two arguments: a regular expression matching substrings that have to be replaced and a string that's going to replace them;

• Matcher methods accept only the second argument (the replacement string).