Replacing substrings in a string

[Csaba Kassitzky]

Hi everyone!
I wanted to make a program part, which replaces "<" and ">" with "<" and ">" so it won't dissappear in HTML context. My problem is that the following method doesn't do it at all:

  public void fillVectors( Vector<String> targetVector, String path ) {
    String str;
    String sentence = "";
    if( type.equals( "lines" ) ) {
      try {
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader( new FileReader( path ) );
        while( ( str = in.readLine( ) ) != null ) {
          str.replaceAll("<","<");
          str.replaceAll(">","&ht;");
          targetVector.add( new String( str ) );
        }
        in.close( );
      } catch ( IOException e ) { System.out.println( e.toString( ) ); }
[...]

Why isn't it working?
Thanks!

[Henry Wong]

String Objects are immutable -- meaning they can't be changed.

str.replaceAll("<","<");
str.replaceAll(">","&ht;");

The replaceAll() method simply returns a new string object with the changes requested. Since you are not assigning the return value, you are simply discarding the String with the changes.

Henry

[Csaba Kassitzky]

Should i use str = str.replaceAll() then?

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

Originally posted by Csaba Kassitzky:
Should i use str = str.replaceAll() then?

Yes.