Java regular expressions, simple search and replace

[Cyrus]

I want to do a simple search and replace regular expression of lines. I am very unfamilar with Java regular expressions, and I'm not sure how to do something as simple as what I want to do.

I have lines that look like this...

access_log /home/%USER%/access_log

I want them changed so %USER% changes to a string, such as "cyrus," so they appear like this

access_log /home/cyrus/access_log

The reason I want to use regular expressions is because I want to use the replaceAll method of the java.lang.String object. If I use replace I have to convert my strings into char arrays, and my code becomes bulky.

[jashburn]

You can specify %USER% directly without using regular expression constructs:

String origString = "access_log /home/%USER%/access_log";
String replacedStr = origString.replaceAll("%USER%", "cyrus");

Note that if you'd rather not work with regular expressions, you can also use StringBuilder's replace method, e.g.,

StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(origString);
int startPercentIndex = origString.indexOf('%');
builder.replace(startPercentIndex, startPercentIndex + "%USER%".length(), "cyrus");

See StringBuilder (Java Platform SE 7 ).

[Cyrus]

Thanks, that has been helpful.