Question

I am needing a bit of assistance in a regular expression I am trying to create, I am usually pretty good with these but this one has me stuck…

I am needing to replace the number 9 in strings on the fly with \d (creating a new regular expression). These are some example strings that can be expected:

X(29)

9(5)

99

X(29)V999S

Now before you answer too quickly, we must not touch the numbers in the brackets…
I have looked at a couple of other answers on here and there is probably something in this solution, but I cannot seem to adapt it – Regex for splitting a string using space when not surrounded by single or double quotes

So far I have come up with

line.replaceAll("[^(\\d)]??9[^)]??", "\\d");

which gives me

X(2\d)

\d(5)

\d\d

X(2\d)V\d\d\dS

Anyone have any thoughts.

Answer 1

What about this?

(?!\([^\(]*)9(?![^\(]*\))