Use Java and RegEx to convert casing in a string

Question

Problem: Turn "my testtext TARGETSTRING my testtext" into "my testtext targetstring my testtext"

Perl supports the "\L"-operation which can be used in the replacement-string.

The Pattern-Class does not support this operation:

Perl constructs not supported by this class: [...] The preprocessing operations \l \u, \L, and \U. http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html

Answer 1

You could use the regexp capturing group (if you really need to use regex, that is, meaning if "TARGETSTRING" is complex enough and "regular" enough to justify being detected by a regex).
You would then apply toLowerCase() to the group #1.

import java.util.regex.*;

public class TargetToLowerCase {

  public static void main(String[] args) {
    StringBuilder sb= new StringBuilder(
            "my testtext TARGETSTRING my testtext");
    System.out.println(sb);
    String regex= "TARGETSTRING ";
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile(regex); // Create the pattern.
    Matcher matcher = p.matcher(sb); // Create the matcher.
    while (matcher.find()) {
      String buf= sb.substring(matcher.start(), matcher.end()).toLowerCase();
      sb.replace(matcher.start(), matcher.end(), buf);
    }
    System.out.println(sb);
  }
}

Answer 2

You can't do this in Java regex. You'd have to manually post-process using String.toUpperCase() and toLowerCase() instead.

Here's an example of how you use regex to find and capitalize words of length at least 3 in a sentence

    String text = "no way oh my god it cannot be";
    Matcher m = Pattern.compile("\\b\\w{3,}\\b").matcher(text);

    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    int last = 0;
    while (m.find()) {
        sb.append(text.substring(last, m.start()));
        sb.append(m.group(0).toUpperCase());
        last = m.end();
    }
    sb.append(text.substring(last));

    System.out.println(sb.toString());
    // prints "no WAY oh my GOD it CANNOT be"

---

Note on appendReplacement and appendTail

Note that the above solution uses substring and manages a tail index, etc. In fact, you can go without these if you use Matcher.appendReplacement and appendTail.

    StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
    while (m.find()) {
        m.appendReplacement(sb, m.group().toUpperCase());
    }
    m.appendTail(sb);

Note how sb is now a StringBuffer instead of StringBuilder. Until Matcher provides StringBuilder overloads, you're stuck with the slower StringBuffer if you want to use these methods.

It's up to you whether the trade-off in less efficiency for higher readability is worth it or not.

See also

• StringBuilder and StringBuffer in Java