Question

String pw="pw:(abc)";//Maybe "pw:(12)","pw:(ab123)"...
pw=pw.replaceFirst("\\(.+\\)", "*");

//pw == result:pw:*

I want the results: pw:*****. (abc) must be * x 5

Asterisk in quantities equal to the length of the content is matched

Can I use String.replaceFirst or String.replaceAll only way to implementing it?

Answer 1

You can do this:

final String pw = "pw:(abc)";

final String anon = pw.replaceAll("[^pw:]", "*");

System.out.println(pw);
System.out.println(anon);

which will result in:

pw:(abc)
pw:*****

Edit: does not work if the password has p/w/: in it… will try to fix..

Edit #2: This turned out to be harder than I thought, had to go with another approach:

    final String input = "pw:(abc) something!";

    Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("\\(.*\\)").matcher(input);

    if (matcher.find()) {
        final String onlyPw = matcher.group();
        final String stars = StringUtils.repeat("*", onlyPw.length());

        System.out.println(input.replace(onlyPw, stars));
    }

So, first find the String consisting of “({something})”. Then create a String consisting of the number of stars in this string. Then replace the string with the stars in the input.

Note: This does not work if the password or the text after the ) contains parantheses, but then again I doubt you will find a regex that does..