What's a good way of building up a String given specific start and end locations?
- by Michael Campbell
(java 1.5)
I have a need to build up a String, in pieces. I'm given a set of (sub)strings, each with a start and end point of where they belong in the final string. Was wondering if there were some canonical way of doing this. This isn't homework, and I can use any licensable OSS, such as jakarta commons-lang StringUtils etc.
My company has a solution using a CharBuffer, and I'm content to leave it as is (and add some unit tests, of which there are none (?!)) but the code is fairly hideous and I would like something easier to read.
As I said this isn't homework, and I don't need a complete solution, just some pointers to libraries or java classes that might give me some insight. The String.Format didn't seem QUITE right...
I would have to honor inputs too long and too short, etc. Substrings would be overlaid in the order they appear (in case of overlap).
As an example of input, I might have something like:
String:start:end
FO:0:3 (string shorter than field)
BAR:4:5 (String larger than field)
BLEH:5:9 (String overlays previous field)
I'd want to end up with
FO BBLEH
01234567890
