Add text replacement methods

[pie-flavor]

These are very much needed, given the relative underpoweredness of TextTemplates.

[ryantheleach]

@pie-flavor Is this still Work In Progress? if so reply with ~wip to mark your issue as Work In Progress or reply with ~qa to mark it as ready for Quality Assurance, if you wish it to be reviewed / tested by contributors / the community.

[Defman]

Is Text not meant to be imutable: Represents an immutable tree-structure of formatted (text) components. Each instance consists of content and a list of children texts appended after the content of this text. The content of the text is available through one of the subclasses.

[ryantheleach]

Sure, but it's a utility function for something that is inherently difficult to do yourself 100% correctly the first time.

Strings are immutable too, doesn't stop them having replace, but it's not something you would want to (ab)use all the time.

My 2c.

[dualspiral]

I don't see a problem with it as long as the javadocs make it clear (in both the body and the returns statement) that the method returns a copy of the Text object with the specified replacements.

[pie-flavor]

@The-Defman I'm confused - where's the issue? The original text never gets modified.

@dualspiral I'll add that, though originally I never thought it could be an issue - anyone using Text.replace has inevitably used String.replace which behaves the same way.

[randombyte-developer]

Can this be added to the next 7.x release or is that against semver?

[pie-flavor]

No API methods get broken, so 7.x should be a valid target.

[gabizou]

Needs to be updated since the text was refactored.

[Cybermaxke]

@gabizou This targets API 7

[ImMorpheus]

@Cybermaxke you need to change the target branch to stable-7 then

[pie-flavor]

Oh good, the git history got clonked. Is this worth pursuing in its current state? Will there be another API 7 release?

[ImMorpheus]

@pie-flavor Yes, please update and rebase

[pie-flavor]

Looks all good from here.

[XakepSDK]

Maybe replace(Text, Text)?

[pie-flavor]

Properly searching for a Text would require remembering the effective formatting of the text in addition to the Text's own formatting, and additionally parsing children, greatly complicating the algorithm. And there wouldn't really be a point in a Text argument that's only ever used via toPlain.

[ImMorpheus]

Working as intended

[Lignium]

You need to add these methods to API 8.