Java codecs

What a shame! I spent few hours trying to find a decoder for Java string literals.

It turned out the Apache Commons Lang project, not Sun, provides the decoder and the encoder. I remembered its value from the time I was looking for an XML encoder to use in my JSP page.

http://commons.apache.org/lang/api/org/apache/commons/lang/StringEscapeUtils.html

http://svn.apache.org/viewvc/commons/proper/lang/trunk/src/java/org/apache/commons/lang/StringEscapeUtils.java?view=markup

I started my search when I realized that a brute force approach such as s.replace("\\\\", "\\").replace("\\n", "\n") would fail to correctly decode a legitimate sequence of 3 characters '\\', '\\' and 'n' into a string of 2 characters '\\' and 'n'. This is because multiple .replace() invocations apply per-character decoding more than once, which is wrong.