How to ensure replaceAll will replace a whole word and not a subString

Question

I have an input of dictionary. The dictionary is iterated over to replace the key from dictionary in the text. But replaceAll function replaces the

Answer 1

replaceAll takes as parameter a regular expression.

In regular expressions, you have word boundaries : \b (use \\b in a string literal). They're the best way to ensure you're matching a word and not a part of a word : "\\bword\\b"

But in your case, you can't use word boundaries as you're not looking for a word ([69-3] isn't a word).

I suggest this :

text=text.replaceAll("(?=\\W+|^)"+Pattern.quote("[69-3]")+"(?=\\W+|$)", ...

The idea is to match a string end or something that's not a word. I can't ensure this will be the right solution for you though : such a pattern must be tuned knowing the exact complete use case.

Note that if all your keys follow a similar pattern there might be a better solution than to iterate through a dictionary, you might for example use a pattern like "(?=\\W+|^)\\[\\d+\\-\\d+\\](?=\\W+|$)".