[Solved] Replacing all of a type of character in a string with another character [closed]

Question

The first argument to replaceAll() expects a regex. The character | is a control character in regex. To make the regex parser understand that you “literally” mean |, you should pass \| to the regex parser. But \ is a control character in Java. To make Java understand that you mean to pass \| to the regex parser, you should pass \\| as the first argument to the replaceAll() method.

Of course, you could also just use the replace() method, which does not interpret the first argument as regex: serverList.replace("|", "\""") (or serverList.replace('|','"') in this particular case) will return the desired string.

Accepted Answer

The first argument to replaceAll() expects a regex. The character | is a control character in regex. To make the regex parser understand that you “literally” mean |, you should pass \| to the regex parser. But \ is a control character in Java. To make Java understand that you mean to pass \| to the regex parser, you should pass \\| as the first argument to the replaceAll() method.

Of course, you could also just use the replace() method, which does not interpret the first argument as regex: serverList.replace("|", "\""") (or serverList.replace('|','"') in this particular case) will return the desired string.