Question

String output = "";
pattern = Pattern.compile(">Part\s.");
matcher = pattern.matcher(docToProcess);
while (matcher.find()) {
      match = matcher.group();
}

I’m trying to use the above code to find the pattern >Part\s. inside docToProcess (Which is a string of a large xml document) and then what I want to do is replace the content that matches the pattern with <ref></ref>

Any ideas how I can make the output variable equal to docToProcess except with the replacements as indicated above?

EDIT: I need to use the matcher somehow when replacing. I can’t just use replaceAll()

Answer 1

This is what you need:

String docToProcess = "... your xml here ...";
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile(">Part\\s.");
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(docToProcess);
StringBuffer output = new StringBuffer();
while (matcher.find()) matcher.appendReplacement(output, "<ref></ref>");
matcher.appendTail(output);

Unfortunately, you can’t use the StringBuilder due to historical constraints on the Java API.