Regular Expression - replaceAll() - how to replace words?

[James Hodgkiss]

Hiya,

I have this regex to replace all instances of myWord:

String oldWord = "oldWord";
String newWord = "newWord";
String sentence = "some sentence that contains " + oldWord;
String newSentence = replaceWordsInSentence(sentence, oldWord, newWord);

private String replaceWordsInSentence(String sentence, String oldWord, String newWord) {
    return sentence.replaceAll("\b" + oldWord + "\b", newWord);
}

...it works in most instances, but when oldWord is at the end of the sentence it is not replaced. Presumably the problem is that "/b" is not a sufficient word boundary. Can someone help me out with the correct regular expression code?

Thanks,
James

[John de Michele]

James:

Have you tried it without including the word boundaries?

John.

[Dennis Thomas]

instead of sentence.replaceAll("\b" + oldWord + "\b", newWord); use

sentence.replaceAll("\\b" + oldWord + "\\b", newWord);

[James Hodgkiss]

Thanks for the replies. Dennis, that did the trick. (John, it is exact words I am wanting to replace, not just any substring occurence of oldWord.)