So first, why this is great. I had to upgrade Swagger from 1.6.6 to 2.2.9, which is very much a breaking change which required changing a LOT of code. But the changes were very formulaic – for example, change “@Api(value” to “@Tag(name”. Those were easy and I could just use replace in files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But then I had to change @ApiResponse(code = \"401\", message<\/code> with @ApiResponse(responseCode = \"401\", description<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the response code could be anything, not just 401! So I couldn\u2019t just replace the strings, as it would lose the response code value. But with regular expression search and replace, I could replace the string and keep the value! This saved me so much time I can’t even tell you. Well, actually I can, really. It was a LOT. (Sit for a moment and relish the eloquence!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This made me very, very happy. So I wanted to share!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Note that I am not going to be trying to teach regular expressions. There is already a lot online about them, and I’m just not going to go there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the IntelliJ menus, select Edit->Find->Find in Files<\/em> to get a text box to search across all files. Click the little box below the file mask with “.*” in it. The text you search for will now be used as a regular expression.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRegEx Button<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
So to show RegEx searches – say you want to search for strings like this: @ApiResponse(code = \"200\", message @ApiResponse(code = \"401\", message @ApiResponse(code = \"404\", message @ApiResponse(code = \"500\", message<\/code> (There is more to the string, thus the lack of a closing parenthesis in the search term.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s say I want to find the 4xx<\/strong> strings, but not any others. That means making a RegEx around the code – basically I want a 4, then two more numbers. RegEx for that would be: 4[0-9]{2}<\/code> The [0-9] means any character in the character set from 0 to 9, and the {2} means two of them. So to make a full search string to find the 4xx values: @ApiResponse(code = \"4[0-9]{2}\", message<\/code> (Yes, you could do shorter, but I\u2019m trying to build up to something!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
RegEx searches like that work to search just in the current file (ie, when you search with \u2318F) as well as searching across files (\u2303\u21e7F). Searching inside a file while you construct the regex is a great way to check what you wrote as IntelliJ highlights what it finds as you type before you move to searching through all files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the search string I used to find all of these (I actually wanted them all, not just the 4xx ones!) was: @ApiResponse(code = [0-9]{3}, message<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well that\u2019s great, I can find what I want to replace, but how do I retain the code value? This is where RegEx Capturing Groups come into play. When you put something into parenthesis, RegEx stores the matched value into a “capturing group”. You can have multiple of them, but for this example we only need one:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To refer to that capturing group, you just need to use an argument like “$1”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So to do the replacement above, use IntelliJ\u2019s \u201cReplace in Files\u201d to search for: @ApiResponse(code = ([0-9]{3}), message<\/code> with a replacement string of @ApiResponse(responseCode = \"$1\", description<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\nExample RegEx Replacement<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
I mean check THAT out! Each of them will get replaced, and the code specified in the original string will get retained- and IntelliJ even shows you what it will do so that you can check before you fire the whole thing off!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is one of those things you don’t need that often, but when you do – it’s huge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"RegEx](\"https:\/\/www.evan.org\/ghg\/wp-content\/themes\/maktub\/assets\/images\/transparent.gif\")
![\"RegEx](\"https:\/\/www.evan.org\/ghg\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/FindInMultipleFiles.png\")
![\"Example](\"https:\/\/www.evan.org\/ghg\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/RegExReplaceExample.png\")