Question

I am writing a program where if someone types in the following two lines:

HELLO, I’D LIKE TO ORDER A FZGH

KID’S MEAL

The program will output it like this:

HELLO, I’D LIKE TO ORDER A KID’S MEAL

In other words, the “FZGH” the user inputs into the sentence will be replaced with the second line’s words, as you can see: the “FZGH” is replaced by “KID’S MEAL.” Kinda get what I mean? If not, I can elaborate more but this is the best I can explain it as.

I’m really close to solving this! My current output is: HELLO, I’D LIKE TO ORDER A FZGH KID’S MEAL

My program didn’t replace the “FZGH” with “KID’S MEAL,” and I don’t know why that is. I thought that by using the .replaceAll() thingy, it would replace “FZGH” with the “KID’S MEAL,” but that didn’t really happen. Here is my program so far:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    sentences();
}

public static void sentences() {
    Scanner console = new Scanner(System.in);
    String sentence1 = console.nextLine();
    String sentence2 = console.nextLine();
    //System.out.println(sentence1 + "\n" + sentence2);
    String word = sentence1.replaceAll("[FZGH]", "");
    word = sentence2;
    System.out.print(sentence1 + word);

}

Where did I mess up, resulting in the FZGH still appearing in output?

Answer 1

Use

sentence1 = sentence1.replaceAll("FZGH", "");
String word = sentence2;

Your first (and primary) problem is that you’re creating a new String named word, that you’re setting to the value of sentence1.replaceAll("[FZGH]", ""). You’re then changing the value of word to be sentence2 immediately afterward, so the replacement is lost.

Instead, setting sentence1 to sentence1.replaceAll("FZGH", ""); will change sentence1 to no longer contain the string "FZGH", which is what you’re going for. You don’t actually need a word value at all, so if you’d like to remove it, it wouldn’t hurt.

In addition, using [FZGH] will replace all F‘s, Z‘s, G‘s, and H‘s from the string- you should use FZGH instead, as this will only remove instances of all four letters in a row.