Question

I’m having problems with strings and I need a solution I’m trying to replace characters found at a certain position with a character found in also the same position for example

 private String wordNormalize(String enteredWord,String dictionary){
    String normalizedWord = null;
// remove empty spaces at beginning and at the end of the word and change to lower case
    normalizedWord = enteredWord.trim().toLowerCase();

    //normalize term, removing all punctuation marks

    normalizedWord = normalizedWord.replaceAll("["+punctuationMarks2+"]", "[b,v]");

    //normalize word removing to character if dictionary has english lang                                           
    normalizedWord = normalizedWord.replaceFirst("to ", " ");
    //normalizeWord if dictionary has german
    if(normalizedWord.length() > 0){
        normalizedWord.replace("a,b,c","t,u,v");
    /*for(int i = 0;i<normalizedWord.length();i++){
          char currentChar = normalizedWord.charAt(i); // currently typed character
          String s1= Character.toString(currentChar);
        for(int j = 0;j<specialCharacters.length;j++){
        s1.replaceAll("[ "+specialCharacters[i]+" ]",""+replaceCharactersDe[i]+"");
        }
         = str.replace("a,b,c","t,u,v");
    }*/
    }

    //normalize term removing special characters and replacing them 
    /*for(int i = 0; i > specialCharacters.length;i++){
        if(normalizedWord.equals(specialCharacters[i])){
            normalizedWord = replaceCharactersDe[i];
        }
    }*/
    return normalizedWord;
}

So if a user enters a its replaced with t and if a user enters b its replaced with u and if the user enters c it will be replaced with v and only in that order is this possible and if it is show me the right way its supposed to be done

Answer 1

It is not clear to me what you are trying to approach with

normalizedWord = normalizedWord.replaceAll("["+punctuationMarks2+"]", "[b,v]");

It does not seem right, but i don’t know how to fix it because I don’t know what it’s trying to do. I guess what you are looking for is

normalizedWord = normalizedWord.replaceAll("\\p{Punct}", "");

On the other part you are doing nothing, because Strings are immutable. You want to do something like

normalizedWord = normalizedWord.replace("a,b,c","t,u,v");

but that would replace all occurrences of the substring "a,b,c" with the string "t,u,v"–

What you want is:

normalizedWord = normalizedWord.replace('a', 't');
normalizedWord = normalizedWord.replace('b', 'u');
normalizedWord = normalizedWord.replace('c', 'v');

We could work on a more general solution, but you have to show us how the dictionary , which is a String, is formatted.