Question

Possible Duplicate:
java String.replaceAll without regex

I have a string and I need to replace some parts of it.
The replacement text contains regex wild chars though. Example:

String target = "Something * to do in ('AAA', 'BBB')";    
String replacement = "Hello";    
String originalText = "ABCDEFHGIJKLMN" + target + "ABCDEFHGIJKLMN";  
System.out.println(originalText.replaceAll(target, replacement));    

I get:
ABCDEFHGIJKLMNSomething * to do in ('AAA', 'BBB')ABCDEFHGIJKLMN

Why doesn’t the replacement occur?

Answer 1

Because *, ( and ) are all meta-characters in regular expressions. Hence all of them need to be escaped. It looks like Java has a convenient method for this:

java.util.regex.Pattern.quote(target)

However, the better option might be, to just not use the regex-using replaceAll function but simply replace. Then you do not need to escape anything.