Search and Replace a Text String in a Word Document in Java

When editing a Word document, finding and replacing text can be a tedious, manual task — but, it doesn’t have to be! In this tutorial we’re going to demonstrate how you can leverage API technology in Java to simplify the search and replace process.

Starting off, we’re going to employ Maven or Gradle to install our Java SDK. For Maven, add a reference to the repository in pom.xml:

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>jitpack.io</id>
        <url>https://jitpack.io</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>

Then, add a reference to the dependency:

<dependencies>
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.github.Cloudmersive</groupId>
    <artifactId>Cloudmersive.APIClient.Java</artifactId>
    <version>v3.54</version>
</dependency>
</dependencies>

If you prefer to use Gradle, you will first add the following to your root build.gradle at the end of repositories:

allprojects {
 repositories {
  ...
  maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' }
 }
}

After that, add the dependency in build.gradle:

dependencies {
        implementation 'com.github.Cloudmersive:Cloudmersive.APIClient.Java:v3.54'
}

Now that the package is installed, we’re ready to instance our API and call the search and replace function:

// Import classes:
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.ApiClient;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.ApiException;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.Configuration;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.invoker.auth.*;
//import com.cloudmersive.client.EditDocumentApi;
ApiClient defaultClient = Configuration.getDefaultApiClient();
// Configure API key authorization: Apikey
ApiKeyAuth Apikey = (ApiKeyAuth) defaultClient.getAuthentication("Apikey");
Apikey.setApiKey("YOUR API KEY");
// Uncomment the following line to set a prefix for the API key, e.g. "Token" (defaults to null)
//Apikey.setApiKeyPrefix("Token");
EditDocumentApi apiInstance = new EditDocumentApi();
ReplaceStringRequest reqConfig = new ReplaceStringRequest(); // ReplaceStringRequest | Document string replacement configuration input
try {
    byte[] result = apiInstance.editDocumentDocxReplace(reqConfig);
    System.out.println(result);
} catch (ApiException e) {
    System.err.println("Exception when calling EditDocumentApi#editDocumentDocxReplace");
    e.printStackTrace();
}

And there you have it; out with the old text, and in with the new!