Question

I want to replace the first context of

web/style/clients.html

with the java String.replaceFirst method so I can get:

${pageContext.request.contextPath}/style/clients.html

I tried

String test =  "web/style/clients.html".replaceFirst("^.*?/", "hello/");

And this give me:

hello/style/clients.html

but when I do

 String test =  "web/style/clients.html".replaceFirst("^.*?/", "${pageContext.request.contextPath}/");

gives me

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal group reference

Answer 1

My hunch is that it is blowing up as $ is a special character. From the documentation

Note that backslashes () and dollar
signs ($) in the replacement string
may cause the results to be different
than if it were being treated as a
literal replacement string. Dollar
signs may be treated as references to
captured subsequences as described
above, and backslashes are used to
escape literal characters in the
replacement string.

So I believe you would need something like

"\\${pageContext.request.contextPath}/"