Java Quotation Matching

Question

Hello all,

I'm not sure if this is a regex question, but i need to be able to grab whats inside single qoutes, and surround them with something. For example:

this is a 'test' of 'something' and 'I' 'really' want 'to' 'solve this'

would turn into

this is a ('test') of ('something') and ('I') ('really') want ('to') ('solve this')

Any help you could provide would be great!

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you can ignore single apostrophes, you could do like this (C# code, should be easy to translate)

string input = "this is a 'test' of 'something' and ...";
Console.WriteLine(Regex.Replace(input, "'([^']*)'", "('$1')"));

Answer 2

String str = "this is a 'test' of 'something'";
String rep = str.replaceAll("'[^']*'", "($0)"); // stand back, I know regex

What I did here is use toe replaceAll() method which searches for all matches for regex "'[^']*'" and replaces them with regex "($0)".

The pattern "'[^']*'" matches all substrings that start and end with a single quote ('), and between them are any characters, except another single quote ([^']), and those can appear any number of times (*). Replacing those with "($0)" means taking every match ($0) and wrapping it with parenthesis.

Answer 3

One easy way (but not always valid) is the following If always you have [ '] and [' ] , you can do this:

myString.replace(" '"," ('"); // replaces all <space_apostrophe> with <space_bracket_apostrophe>

Do the same for the rear bracket :)

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One more thing - why do you even have apostrophes-surrounded words? Is it a must that they must be like that? If you made them like that, why did you do it and then look for another approach !