about java, String.replaceAll

Question

I've been trying to solve this problem, i did a research a little about the replaceAll method and it seems that it uses a regular expression. But i never heard of any regular expression that contains '.' character. This is the code i've been using:

System.out.println(parsed[1]);
myStatus = parsed[1].replaceAll("...", " ");
System.out.println("new: " + myStatus);
status.setText(myStatus);

Output result is:

old...string new:

Answer 1

If you want to replace the literal String "..." (three dots), either:

• use replace("...", " ") , which does not use regular expressions
• use replaceAll("\\\\.{3}", " ") , which is how you specify a literal dot in regex

Unless you need to use replaceAll() (because some implementation you are calling uses it), use replace()

Edited:

Thanks Louis \\\\.{3} is simpler than \\\\.\\\\.\\\\. (doh!)

Answer 2

What your call is actually doing is replacing any group of 3 characters to a space. Thus, the string "old...string" would become 4 spaces. You would require to escape the dots or define a character class quantifier , as they are predefined characters .

Something like

myStatus = parsed[1].replaceAll("[.]{3}", " ");

Note : You can test your regular expressions for Java here .