How to replace string only once without regex in Java?

Question

I need to replace a dynamic substring withing a larger string, but only once (i.e. first match). The String class provides only replace(), which replaces ALL instances of the substring; there is a replaceFirst() method but it only takes regexp instead of a regular string. I have two concerns with using regex:

1) my substring is dynamic, so might contain weird characters that mean something else in regex, and I don't want deal with character escaping.

2) this replacement happens very often, and I'm not sure whether using regex will impact performance. I can't compile the regex beforehand since the regex itself is dynamic!

I must be missing something here since this seems to me is a very basic thing... Is there a replaceFirst method taking regular string somewhere else in the java franework?

Answer 1

You should use already tested and well documented libraries in favor of writing your own code!

StringUtils.replaceOnce("aba", "a", "")    = "ba" 

The StringUtils class is from Apache Commons Lang3 package and can be imported in Maven like this:

<dependency>     <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>     <artifactId>commons-lang3</artifactId>     <version>3.8.1</version> </dependency>