Replace exact string with special characters and not the part of another substring

Question

I am trying to replace the substring from a string like:

Sample string value '[1]T.1.v - Marriage Statement'!C10 and this

The text to replace is '[1]T.1.v - Marriage Statement'!C10 with some other string say var1 so that the string becomes Sample string value var1 and this . The problem is there can be strings with values like Sample string value '[1]T.1.v - Marriage Statement'!C101 and this where the replacement should not work. I was exploring the word boundary regex to limit the replacement:

String sample = "Value can be '[1]T.1.v - Marriage Statement'!C10 and this";
String a = sample.replaceAll("\\b'[1]T.1.v - Marriage Statement'!C10\\b", "var1");
System.out.println(a);

But this doesn't seem to replace the word at all. I tried simple string replace but that will replace the substring in Sample string value '[1]T.1.v - Marriage Statement'!C101 and this as well giving output as Sample string value var11 and this which is an error.

Any suggestions how can this be achieved?

Answer 1

删除前导\\b然后使用\\Q...\\E转义序列将输入字符串视为文字：

String a = sample.replaceAll("\\Q" + param +"\\E\\b", "var1");

Answer 2

Single quote is not considered a word boundary, so the initial \\\\b anchor prevents the rest of the text from matching.

Moreover, your text itself has a significant number of special characters, so it should be quoted with \\\\Q and \\\\E .

Here is a regex that fixes these shortcomings:

"(?<=\\s|^)\\Q'[1]T.1.v - Marriage Statement'!C10\\E(?=\\s|$)"

It replaces the initial \\\\b with (?<=\\\\s|^) , and the final \\\\b with (?=\\\\s|$) to allow for the target string to begin and end in non-word characters, such as quotes. Use of \\\\Q and \\\\E allows us to keep special characters in the rest of the target string unescaped.

Demo.

Answer 3

转义括号和点

'\[1\]T\.1\.v - Marriage Statement'!C10

Answer 4

Two things:

• change your \\\\' in your replaceAll to just \\'

• change replaceAll(... to replace(... (See bottom of post)

It should look like this:

public static void main(String[]args) {
    String sample = "Value can be '[1]T.1.v - Marriage Statement'!C10 and this";
    String a = sample.replace("\'[1]T.1.v - Marriage Statement\'!C10", "var1");
    System.out.println(a);
}

Yielding the output:

Value can be var1 and this

using replaceAll is better if you are replacing a bunch of occurances of something, such as the letter A. replace is good for replacing something if it is just one instance.