I work in a pretty large Java-project (2500+ classes) that uses an old code standard where all
member variables are prefixed with “m_” (e.g m_temperature). There is really no reason for this any longer and I’d like to get rid of them but:
- In order to make the change I must do all variables at once.
- It must not generate any bugs.
The first naive approach of simply renaming all the “m_variable” to just “variable” will not be sufficient as that could produce name collisions between an already existing variable named “variable”, and the newly renamed one.
So, to sum up:
How do I rename all these pesky member variablest without getting into trouble and are there any more problems than the one mentioned above?
Yes, I’m aware of the refactoring/renaming features within IDEs, please bear in mind that I want to do the changes to all variables matching the criteria at once and not by right-clicking on variables and renaming them one-by-one.
Theres a question on SC which is about a massive refactoring in java too. The best answer is using japvaparser and implementing a visitor to do the actual refactoring. This shouldn’t be that much work for a simple rename.