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In my Text Rendering system for my game, I've implemented support for coloured words. So, if I want to render a sentence with the first word in red, and the other words in white, I can do something like this:

"|3Hello |1there Steven!"

When the string is rendered, it searches for a | character, and then looks at the number afterwards, which corresponds to a certain colour, (3 = red, 1 = white) and then it colours the rest of the string in that colour.

I want to be able to remove the | character as well as the number after it.

When it looks at the message and sees the |3, I want it to set the colour to red, and then remove the |3. If I use a method that replaces all the | followed by a number after it, when it comes to the part with |1, it won't set the colour to white because the |1 isn't in the message anymore.

How can I do this?

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3 Answers 3

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2

| is a special character so you must escape it

How about this? (assuming there is only one number after the '|')

str=str.substring(0,str.indexOf("|")+2).replaceAll("[|]\\d+", "")+str.substring(str.indexOf("|")+2);
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7 Comments

Won't this replace all of them? As stated in the question, I can't do that.
It only replace | that preceeds by number(s). If you have |3Hello |1ther|e Steven!, then str=str.replaceAll("[\\|]+[0-9]", ""); gives you Hello ther|e Steven!
I understand that, but, what I mean is that I want it to see the |3, process that, then ONLY replace the |3, because if it replaces the |1 as well, then it can't process that when it gets to it.
ok, now I don't get it. you only want to replace the first occurrence of [\\|]+[0-9]?
I know, it's hard to understand. I'll edit my question to explain it.
|
2

You could use the following regex to match an | followed by one or more digits, then replace with empty string: 

[|]\d+

Here is a sample. Here is some test code: 

String test = "|3Hello |1there Steven!";
String replaced = test.replaceAll("[|]\\d+", "");
System.out.println(replaced);
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2 Comments

And here's a link on how to use regular expressions (regexes) in Java: docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/regex
Thanks for helping, although this wasn't exactly what I was looking for, I appreciate the help. :) +1
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You can split the input text by "|" and check the 1st character, assuming you not expecting to use any other | in your text. Not sure how you want to display the colors, but here's an example using html:

public static void main(String[] args) {

    String[] TEXT_COLORS = { 
            "FF0000", // Red
            "FF7F00", // Orange
            "FFFF00", // Yellow
            "00FF00" // Green
            };

    String input = "|3Hello |1there Steven!";
    String[] coloredPhrases = StringUtils.split(input, "|");

    StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder();
    for (int i=0; i < coloredPhrases.length; i++) {
        String phrase = coloredPhrases[i];
        if (phrase.substring(0,1).matches("\\d")) {
            int colorIndex = Integer.parseInt(phrase.substring(0,1));
            output.append(String.format("<font color=#%s>%s</font>", TEXT_COLORS[colorIndex],phrase.substring(1)));
        } else {
            output.append(phrase);          
        }
    }

    System.out.print(output);
}
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