Use RegEx to replace lines in eclipse

Question

I have a huge xml as follows which I have to assign to a single string. This xml is really huge to so I have to go every line and put " " and + before each line. How can I do that with eclipse's find/replace using regEx.

<Student>
  <name></name>
  <age></age>
  <class></class>
  <section></section>
 // More tags
</Student>

What I want :

public final String studentRequest = "<Student>"
            + " <name></name> "
            + " <age></age> "
            + " <class></class>"
            + " <section></section> "
            + " </Student>" ;

Thanks in advance.

If it is in the file then why not simply read content of that file to String? Why do you want to put it as string directly via editor? — Pshemo, May 17 '17 at 12:52
Alternatively, You can copy the contents of the xml and paste it inside the quotes in `public final String studentRequest = "";` The IDE will automatically formats it. — ayip, May 17 '17 at 12:55
Possibly related: http://stackoverflow.com/a/2159931/1393766, but this will also add line separators like `\n` `\r` at the end of each line so I am not sure if that is what you wanted. — Pshemo, May 17 '17 at 12:59

Malte Hartwig · Answer 1 · 2017-05-17T13:42:53.560

Highlight the lines with the text, and remember to put the Scope to "Selected Lines".

Then you search for (.)$ and replace by $1"\+ (or $1\\n"\+ if you need linebreaks), and replace ^(.) by "$1.

This will turn

hello
world
!

into

"hello"+
"world"+
"!"

Add a variable assignment at the first line and a semicolon at the end, and you are done. There might be issues if you text contains special characters, though so try to clean those up first.

Use RegEx to replace lines in eclipse

1 Answers1