Question

I’m trying to replace the occurence of a certain String from a given text file. Here’s the code I’ve written:

BufferedReader tempFileReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(tempFile)));
File tempFileBuiltForUse = new File("C:\\testing\\anotherTempFile.txt");
Writer changer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(tempFileBuiltForUse));
String lineContents ;
while( (lineContents = tempFileReader.readLine()) != null)
{
    Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("/.");
    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(lineContents);
    String lineByLine = null;
    while(matcher.find())
    {
        lineByLine = lineContents.replaceAll(matcher.group(),System.getProperty("line.separator"));
        changer.write(lineByLine);
    }
}
changer.close();
tempFileReader.close();

Suppose the contents of my tempFile are:

This/DT is/VBZ a/DT sample/NN text/NN ./. 

I want the anotherTempFile to contain :

This/DT is/VBZ a/DT sample/NN text/NN .
with a new line.

But I’m not getting the desired output. And I’m not able to see where I’m going wrong. 🙁
Kindly help. 🙂

Answer 1

A dot means “every character” in regular expressions. Try to escape it:

Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("\\./\\.");

(You need two backslahes, to escape the backslash itself inside the String, so that Java knows you want to have a backslash and not a special character as the newline character, e.g. \n