Question

I’m wanting to (in Java) find any substrings in a string which start with say aba and end in say aca, where there is one or more non-whitespace chars between them.

For example” blingblangabablahacablingblang would find the substring abablahaca.

Then I want to replace each of those substrings, modifying the start to just b and the end to ca, but leaving the internal blah as it was.

For example” blingblangabablahacablingblang would be changed to blingblangbblahcablingblang.

Is there some way I can do this using String.replaceAll() ? There will be many instances within the original string to change.

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

You could try:

myString.replaceAll("aba(\\w*?)aca", "b$1ca") // would also match abaaca, without blah in the middle

or

myString.replaceAll("aba(\\w+?)aca", "b$1ca") // match onlu if there is a char between aba and aca