Java equivalent to PHP's preg_replace_callback

Question

I'm in the process of moving an application from PHP to Java and there is heavy use of regular expressions in the code. I've run across something in PHP that doesn't seem to have a java equivalent:

preg_replace_callback()

For every match in the regex, it calls a function that is passed the match text as a parameter. As an example usage:

$articleText = preg_replace_callback("/\[thumb(\d+)\]/",'thumbReplace', $articleText);
# ...
function thumbReplace($matches) {
   global $photos;
   return "<img src=\"thumbs/" . $photos[$matches[1]] . "\">";
}

What would be the ideal way to do this in Java?

Answer 1

Trying to emulate PHP's callback feature seems an awful lot of work when you could just use appendReplacement() and appendTail() in a loop:

StringBuffer resultString = new StringBuffer();
Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("regex");
Matcher regexMatcher = regex.matcher(subjectString);
while (regexMatcher.find()) {
  // You can vary the replacement text for each match on-the-fly
  regexMatcher.appendReplacement(resultString, "replacement");
}
regexMatcher.appendTail(resultString);