Question

I have an ArrayList of strings that i need to modify. When i add them to the list they look like this.

tick.add("CAST.ST");
tick.add("ELUX-B.ST");
tick.add("EKTA-B.ST");

I then have a method to modify the names to remove “.ST” and add “.XML”

private static void addFileNames(List<String> ticks, List<File> fileNames)
    {
        List<String> tick = new ArrayList<String>();
        for(int i=0; i<ticks.size(); i++)
            {
            tick.add(ticks.get(i).replaceAll(".ST", ".xml"));

            }
        for(int i=0; i<tick.size(); i++)
        {
            File f = new File("XML/" + tick.get(i));
            fileNames.add(f);

        }

This works perfectly for all Strings except “CAST.ST”, which gets modified to “C.xml.xml”.
I also tried replaceFirst and then it replaces the substring “AST” to “C.xml.ST”.

Can someone see what i am doing wrong here?

Answer 1

You need to escape the ., \., as a period in regex means match any character. In the case of "CAST.ST" the posted regex will match "AST" and ".ST".

Change:

tick.add(ticks.get(i).replaceAll(".ST", ".xml")); 

to:

tick.add(ticks.get(i).replaceAll("\\.ST", ".xml"));