Question

Trying to get a simple string replace to work using a Groovy script. Tried various things, including escaping strings in various ways, but can’t figure it out.

String file ="C:\\Test\\Test1\\Test2\\Test3\\"
String afile = file.toString() println
"original string: " + afile
afile.replace("\\\\", "/")
afile.replaceAll("\\\\", "/") println
"replaced string: " + afile

This code results in:

original string: C:\Test\Test1\Test2\Test3\
replaced string: C:\Test\Test1\Test2\Test3\

—————————-

The answer, as inspired by Sorrow, looks like this:

  // first, replace backslashes
  String afile = file.toString().replaceAll("\\\\", "/")
  // then, convert backslash to forward slash
  String fixed = afile.replaceAll("//", "/")  

Answer 1

replace returns a different string. In Java Strings cannot be modified, so you need to assign the result of replacing to something, and print that out.

String other = afile.replaceAll("\\\\", "/")
println "replaced string: " + other

Edited: as Neftas pointed in the comment, \ is a special character in regex and thus have to be escaped twice.