What is the most efficent way to search a string for special characters and replace them?

Asked Aug 25 '17 at 07:32

Active Aug 25 '17 at 07:51

Viewed 31 times

Im trying to search all the special characters in a string and escape them. The Input String must be failsafe so I need to escape the characters. The example String looks for example like this : "Foo Bar "Gone Wild "- <br>Ted Talk</br> " To secure that the String still looks the same it needs to be something like this afterwards "Foo Bar \"Gone Wild \" \- \<br\>Ted Talk \<\/br\>"

I came up with this solution:

 final String[] metaCharacters = {"\\", "^", "$", "{", "}", "[", "]", "(", ")", ".", "*", "+", "?", "|", "<", ">", "-", "&", "#"};
    String outputString = "";
    for (int characterIndex = 0; characterIndex < metaCharacters.length; characterIndex++) {
        if (inputString.contains(metaCharacters[characterIndex])) {
            outputString = inputString.replace(metaCharacters[characterIndex], "\\" + metaCharacters[characterIndex]);
        }
    }

But I'm not very happy with that. Its written in Java.

edited Aug 25 '17 at 07:41

Andy Turner

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asked Aug 25 '17 at 07:32

TheOddCoder

@Wiktor that's assuming this is escaping them for regex. I mean, sure, it might be, but characters like `<>` don't have to be escaped for regex. – Andy Turner Aug 25 '17 at 07:34
@AndyTurner: Sure, no need to. – Wiktor Stribiżew Aug 25 '17 at 07:36
@WiktorStribiżew ...but OP *is* looking to escape those characters. – Andy Turner Aug 25 '17 at 07:38
@AndyTurner Yes, because OP does not know of a simpler approach – Wiktor Stribiżew Aug 25 '17 at 07:40
@WiktorStribiżew but `Pattern.quote` won't give the desired output: `Pattern.quote("<>")` is `<>`; OP requires `\<\>\&\#`. – Andy Turner Aug 25 '17 at 07:43
@AndyTurner Why would anyone need to escape them for use in a regex pattern? None is a special metacharacter. – Wiktor Stribiżew Aug 25 '17 at 07:46
@WiktorStribiżew because... it's not escaping them for a regex pattern! – Andy Turner Aug 25 '17 at 07:49
@WiktorStribiżew Im not escaping them for a regex. – TheOddCoder Aug 25 '17 at 07:51

What is the most efficent way to search a string for special characters and replace them?

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