[java] String replace method is not replacing characters

I have a sentence that is passed in as a string and I am doing a replace on the word "and" and I want to replace it with " ". And it's not replacing the word "and" with white space. Below is an example of my logic. And when I debug this the logic does fall into the sentence.replace.

String sentence = "Define, Measure, Analyze, Design and Verify"
if (sentence.contains("and")){
    sentence.replace("and", " ");
}

Is there something I am missing here.

This question is related to java string replace

The answer is


You should re-assign the result of the replacement, like this:

 sentence = sentence.replace("and", " ");

Be aware that the String class is immutable, meaning that all of its methods return a new string and never modify the original string in-place, so the result of invoking a method in an instance of String must be assigned to a variable or used immediately for the change to take effect.


package com.tulu.ds;

public class EmailSecurity {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        System.out.println(returnSecuredEmailID("[email protected]"));
    }
    private static String returnSecuredEmailID(String email){
        String str=email.substring(1, email.lastIndexOf("@")-1);
        return email.replaceAll(email.substring(1, email.lastIndexOf("@")-1),replacewith(str.length(),"*"));
    }
    private static String replacewith(int length,String replace) {
        String finalStr="";
        for(int i=0;i<length;i++){
            finalStr+=replace;
        }
        return finalStr;
    }   
}

Strings are immutable, meaning their contents cannot change. When you call replace(this,that) you end up with a totally new String. If you want to keep this new copy, you need to assign it to a variable. You can overwrite the old reference (a la sentence = sentence.replace(this,that) or a new reference as seen below:

public class Test{

    public static void main(String[] args) {

        String sentence = "Define, Measure, Analyze, Design and Verify";

        String replaced = sentence.replace("and", "");
        System.out.println(replaced);

    }
}

As an aside, note that I've removed the contains() check, as it is an unnecessary call here. If it didn't contain it, the replace will just fail to make any replacements. You'd only want that contains method if what you're replacing was different than the actual condition you're checking.


You aren't doing anything with the return value of replace. You'll need to assign the result of the method, which is the new String:

sentence = sentence.replace("and", " ");

A String is immutable in java. Methods like replace return a new String.

Your contains test is unnecessary: replace will just no-op if there aren't instances of the text to replace.


Examples related to java

Under what circumstances can I call findViewById with an Options Menu / Action Bar item? How much should a function trust another function How to implement a simple scenario the OO way Two constructors How do I get some variable from another class in Java? this in equals method How to split a string in two and store it in a field How to do perspective fixing? String index out of range: 4 My eclipse won't open, i download the bundle pack it keeps saying error log

Examples related to string

How to split a string in two and store it in a field String method cannot be found in a main class method Kotlin - How to correctly concatenate a String Replacing a character from a certain index Remove quotes from String in Python Detect whether a Python string is a number or a letter How does String substring work in Swift How does String.Index work in Swift swift 3.0 Data to String? How to parse JSON string in Typescript

Examples related to replace

How do I find and replace all occurrences (in all files) in Visual Studio Code? How to find and replace with regex in excel How to replace text in a column of a Pandas dataframe? How to replace negative numbers in Pandas Data Frame by zero Replacing few values in a pandas dataframe column with another value How to replace multiple patterns at once with sed? Using tr to replace newline with space replace special characters in a string python Replace None with NaN in pandas dataframe Batch script to find and replace a string in text file within a minute for files up to 12 MB