My regex in replaceAll() in Java is not working

Question

I want to replace (words that starts with letter 'a' has one or more chars and ends with 'a') with sign '!' and print it, but nothing is working. Why?

class Test
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        String s = "aba accca azzza wwwwa";
        System.out.println(s = s.replaceAll("\ba.+?a\b", "!"));
    }
}

Current ouput: aba accca azzza wwwwa

Desired ouput: ! ! ! wwwwa

you mean this? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37453828/i-want-to-find-all-words-using-java-regex-that-starts-with-and-ends-with-sp — Sabareesh Muralidharan, Jun 20 '20 at 11:44

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 20 '20 at 11:27

The backslash inside replaceAll() should be escaped like below:

public static void main(String args[]) throws IOException {
               String s = "aba accca azzza wwwwa";
               s = s.replaceAll("\\ba.+?a\\b", "!");
               System.out.println(s);
    }

output: ! ! ! wwwwa

My regex in replaceAll() in Java is not working

1 Answers1