What is an efficient way to replace many characters in a string?

Question

String handling in Java is something I\'m trying to learn to do well. Currently I want to take in a string and replace any characters I find.

Here is my current inef

Answer 1

My implementation is based on look up table.

public static String convertWord(String str) {
    char[] words = str.toCharArray();
    char[] find = {'á','é','ú','ý','ð','ó','ö','æ','þ','-','.',
            '/'};
    String[] replace = {"a","e","u","y","d","o","o","ae","th"};
    StringBuilder out = new StringBuilder(str.length());
    for (int i = 0; i < words.length; i++) {
        boolean matchFailed = true;
        for(int w = 0; w < find.length; w++) {
            if(words[i] == find[w]) {
                if(w < replace.length) {
                    out.append(replace[w]);
                }
                matchFailed = false;
                break;
            }
        }
        if(matchFailed) out.append(words[i]);
    }
    return out.toString();
}