Easier way to insert character into String

[PLUCKYHD]

Lets say I have a string consisting of numbers and letters that is 32 characters long. I want to insert a "-" every 2 spaces is there a quick and easy way to do this without looping?

[Fuzzy]

Not really. And any other function that you DID use would in turn do the looping in it, so it's not really a performance concern.

Well, I guess that's not entirely correct, if you KNOW the string is always 32 characters long, you could string together a long list of substrings:

Substring(input,0,2) & "-" & Substring(input,2,2) & "-" & Substring(input,4,2)... etc...

[jreichen]

Regular expressions make this pretty easy as long as you can find the right one I kept getting an extra dash at the end until I found the answer (the funny-looking '(?!$)' ) on this page.

"ABCDEFGH".replaceAll("(.{2})(?!$)", "$1-")

[PLUCKYHD]

Originally Posted by jreichen

Regular expressions make this pretty easy as long as you can find the right one I kept getting an extra dash at the end until I found the answer (the funny-looking '(?!$)' ) on this page.

"ABCDEFGH".replaceAll("(.{2})(?!$)", "$1-")

You hit another homerun thanks for the link and info works like a charm.

[Fuzzy]

They are powerful.. but damn i hate RegEx... ;-)

[jreichen]

Yeah my original regex kept appending a dash at the end. It took me a while to find the magic '(?!$)' that prevented it. It's one of those "special constructs" in the Javadoc that I never understood until now.