Question

I am having regex expression problem. need helps from regex experts!
It’s fairly simple but I can’t get it to work.

I know if I want to check the starting of a text, I should use ^
and ending of the text, I should use $

I want to replace [quote] to <a>quote</a>.

This doesn’t seems to work..

String test = "this is a [quote]"
test.replaceAll("^\\[", "<a>");
test.replaceAll("\\]$", "</a>");

I want the string to become "this is a <a>quote</a>"..

Answer 1

If you want to replace [ and ] with pair, you need to replace them in one time.

String test = "this [test] is a [quote]";
String result = test.replaceAll("\\[([^\\]]+)\\]", "<a>$1</a>");