Question

I need to replace some words in a text, but I need to put conditions in the replacement strategy as follows:

I want to replace word1 with word2:

String word1 = "word1";
String word2 = "word2";

but I don’t want to replace word1 if it’s preceded by word3 which is:

String word3 = "word3."; //with the dot at the ending

That is if the text is word3.word1 I don’t want to touch it.
But I can’t seem to handle that with word boundaries using String‘s replaceAll method.

EDIT:

And also I don’t want to change if word1 has a prefix or suffix of “-” character i.e. -word1 or word1- or -word1-

Any help would be appreciable.

Answer 1

I think this will give you a hint

String str = "word3.word1.word2.word1";
str.replaceAll("word3.word1", "word3.wordX1").replaceAll("word1", "word2").replaceAll("wordX1", "word1");