Comments on: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal group reference in String.replaceAll

By: Veera

Veera — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:10:45 +0000

according to the API documentation of Matcher.appendReplacement method,

The replacement string may contain references to subsequences captured during the previous match: Each occurrence of $g will be replaced by the result of evaluating group(g).

and that's what I meant by grouping.

By: Sreenivas

Sreenivas — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:02:35 +0000

Veera, the replaceAll method takes in regular expressions as the parameter and ‘$’ in regex is a special character that represents end of a line.

Grouping, on the other hand is done using parantheses.

By: Veera

Veera — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 03:07:38 +0000

I haven’t tested the code for other regex symbols, but I guess those symbols also should be escaped.

By: JB

JB — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:18:24 +0000

Yes, debugging teaches a few lessons.

I thought it was due to $ being a regex symbol. Pardon me, I am not a Java programmer, but know javascripting.

java.util.regex namespace gave me solace

Did you try with other regex symbols like ^

By: Veera

Veera — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:50:13 +0000

agreed. Otherwise it is little difficult to figure it out why the replaceAll() method fails.

By: Mohammed Yousuff

Mohammed Yousuff — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:02:04 +0000

Good one. I believe String class should say the same docs as it was in Matcher.replaceAll() which is added in string.replaceAll()….