CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaregex
Tony White
Tony White

Reputation: 153

Regular Express to replace instances of character, but NOT inside brackets

I am needing a bit of assistance in a regular expression I am trying to create, I am usually pretty good with these but this one has me stuck...

I am needing to replace the number 9 in strings on the fly with \d (creating a new regular expression). These are some example strings that can be expected:

X(29)

9(5)

99

X(29)V999S

Now before you answer too quickly, we must not touch the numbers in the brackets... I have looked at a couple of other answers on here and there is probably something in this solution, but I cannot seem to adapt it - Regex for splitting a string using space when not surrounded by single or double quotes

So far I have come up with

line.replaceAll("[^(\\d)]??9[^)]??", "\\d");

which gives me 

X(2\d)

\d(5)

\d\d

X(2\d)V\d\d\dS

Anyone have any thoughts.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 218

Answers (2)

Michael Frederick
Michael Frederick

Reputation: 16714

What about this?

(?!\([^\(]*)9(?![^\(]*\))

Upvotes: 2

barry
barry

Reputation: 210

given that your rules are pretty straight-forward but just difficult to implement with regular expressions, why not do-it-yourself? Iterate over the string and create a new string keeping track of the state (in brackets or out).

Barry

Upvotes: 2

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