I'm trying to come up with a regular expression that can match only characters not preceded by a special escape sequence in a string.
For instance, in the string Is ? stranded//?
, I want to be able to replace the ?
which hasn't been escaped with another string, so I can have this result : **Is Dave stranded?**
But for the life of me I have not been able to figure out a way. I have only come up with regular expressions that eat all the replaceable characters.
How do you construct a regular expression that matches only characters not preceded by an e开发者_运维技巧scape sequence?
Use a negative lookbehind, it's what they were designed to do!
(?<!//)[?]
To break it down:
(
?<! #The negative look behind. It will check that the following slashes do not exist.
// #The slashes you are trying to avoid.
)
[\?] #Your special charactor list.
Only if the // cannot be found, it will progress with the rest of the search.
I think in Java it will need to be escaped again as a string something like:
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(?<!//)[\\?]");
Try this Java code:
str="Is ? stranded//?";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("(?<!//)([?])");
m = p.matcher(str);
StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
while (m.find()) {
m.appendReplacement(sb, m.group(1).replace("?", "Dave"));
}
m.appendTail(sb);
String s = sb.toString().replace("//", "");
System.out.println("Output: " + s);
OUTPUT
Output: Is Dave stranded?
I was thinking about this and have a second simplier solution, avoiding regexs. The other answers are probably better but I thought I might post it anyway.
String input = "Is ? stranded//?";
String output = input
.replace("//?", "a717efbc-84a9-46bf-b1be-8a9fb714fce8")
.replace("?", "Dave")
.replace("a717efbc-84a9-46bf-b1be-8a9fb714fce8", "?");
Just protect the "//?" by replacing it with something unique (like a guid). Then you know any remaining question marks are fair game.
Use grouping. Here's one example:
import java.util.regex.*;
class Test {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("([^/][^/])(\\?)");
String s = "Is ? stranded//?";
Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
if (m.matches)
s = m.replaceAll("$1XXX").replace("//", "");
System.out.println(s + " -> " + s);
}
}
Output:
$ java Test
Is ? stranded//? -> Is XXX stranded?
In this example, I'm:
- first replacing any non-escaped ? with "XXX",
- then, removing the "//" escape sequences.
EDIT Use if (m.matches)
to ensure that you handle non-matching strings properly.
This is just a quick-and-dirty example. You need to flesh it out, obviously, to make it more robust. But it gets the general idea across.
Match on a set of characters OTHER than an escape sequence, then a regex special character. You could use an inverted character class ([^/]
) for the first bit. Special case an unescaped regex character at the front of the string.
String aString = "Is ? stranded//?";
String regex = "(?<!//)[^a-z^A-Z^\\s^/]";
System.out.println(aString.replaceAll(regex, "Dave"));
The part of the regular expression [^a-z^A-Z^\\s^/]
matches non-alphanumeric, whitespace or non-forward slash charaters.
The (?<!//)
part does a negative lookbehind - see docco here for more info
This gives the output Is Dave stranded//?
try matching:
(^|(^.)|(.[^/])|([^/].))[special characters list]
I used this one:
((?:^|[^\\])(?:\\\\)*[ESCAPABLE CHARACTERS HERE])
Demo: https://regex101.com/r/zH1zO3/4
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