String.replace() with unusual characters

[OhioSteve]

I can do this with String.replace():
String line= "Mary had a little lamb.";
line= line.replace('a','x');

But I want to do these things:
String line= "Mary had a little lamb.";
line= line.replace([period character],'x');

String line= "Mary had a little lamb.";
line= line.replace([carriage return],[comma]);

I want to use .replace with punctuation marks and invisible characters. But the compiler freaks out whenever I attempt this. I strongly suspect that ascii or unicode values are somehow involved in this. Can you tell me the specific syntax that I need to use.

 

[quarryknight]

Here is my test code:

public class Test
{
	public static void main(String args[])
	{
		String str = "Hello,\nworld!\n";
		System.out.println(str);
		
		str = str.replace('\n', ' ');
		str = str.replace(',', '!');
		System.out.println(str);
		
		System.exit(0);
	}
}

If you test my code, you see that the replacements for a new line and a comma work just fine. Test out my code to check to see if this code works with your compiler. Let me know what happens.

Nick Ruiz

http://www.DealMerchant.net

Webmaster, DBA

 

[prosper]

if newline is part of your string, use
"s1"+(new Character((char)10)).toString()+"s2

 

[sedj]

>>>> But the compiler freaks out whenever I attempt this.

Helpful. Does it do a little dance, or does it actually give an error message that you could post ?!

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[stefanwagner]

Are you sure you're using replace (char ... and not replaceAll (String ... , which works with regular expressions?

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[quarryknight]

I don't think this should be much of a problem, but what version of J2SDK do you have? As I said before, the code I posted should work.

Nick Ruiz

http://www.DealMerchant.net

Webmaster, DBA

 

[toolkit]

The char '.' is a literal '.'

The string "." is evaluated as a regular expression in the replace call.

To escape this, try using "\\." instead. The first '\' escapes the second '\', so that the character sequence passed to the regular expression engine is '\' '.'

This then ensures the period is not treated as a special metacharacter.

One way to get round this problem for large pieces of text is:

"\\Q your text containing metachars like . + *\\E"

See also:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html

Cheers, Neil

 

[OhioSteve]

You are right. "\n" does force a carriage return. Where can I get a list of all of the codes like that?

 

[quarryknight]

To find a list of escape sequences in Java, just do a Google search on "java escape sequences" and check out the results. This is the first URL to come up (which may help you out):

http://www.michael-thomas.com/tech/java/javacert/JCP_EscapeCharacters.htm

Nick Ruiz

http://www.DealMerchant.net

Webmaster, DBA