CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexvariablesreplaceintellij-ideafind
Shaun Scovil
Shaun Scovil

Reputation: 3987

RegEx: How to refer to multiple occurrences of a subexpression in a replacement string

Not sure if this is possible, but I'm trying to do a dynamic Find/Replace in IntelliJ IDEA...

In my Java project, there are several methods that contain string concatenation like this:

return "[foo=" + foo + ", bar=" + bar + ", this=" + this + ", that=" + that + "]";

I wrote the following RegEx to find all of these occurrences:

return (\"[^\"]+\")+((\s\+\s)+([\pL\pN\r\s]*)+(\s\+\s)+(\"[^\"]+\"))*;

Now I want to replace these concatenations with equivalent String.format() returns, like this:

return String.format("[foo=%s, bar=%s, this=%s, that=%s]", foo, bar, this, that);

My replacement RegEx looks like this so far:

return String.format\($1$6,$4\);

...but a couple of things are happening here, and a couple of tricky requirements.

  1. $4 is empty.
  2. $6 only returns the last occurrence of (\"[^\"]+\").
  3. I need to produce ", $4" for each occurrence of $4.
  4. I need to strip the quotation marks out of $1 and $6 and append a "%s" after any "=" signs.

Is this possible? Any idea how to do it, allowing for concatenation of any number of strings?

Thanks in advance!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 201

Answers (1)

dbrown0708
dbrown0708

Reputation: 4764

You don't need Regex find-and-replace. If you put your cursor in the middle your your String concatenation, a yellow light bulb should appear. If you click the light bulb (or better yet, alt-Enter), it should give you at least three different refactorings of that line of code.

See the Intentions documentation here.

Upvotes: 2

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