Case-insensitive search and replace

Question

I have the following string, how do I search and replace it in Java?

Before

*animal is a *ANImal and *Bird is a *bIrd.

After search and replace, it shoud be *animal = Dog and *bird = Peacock

Dog is a Dog and Peacock is a Peacock.

I have tried replacing the occurances this pattern - (?i)\\*animal but it doesn't work. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

   public String replaceStrPattern(String str, String pattern, String replaceWith) {

            String newStr = str;
            String nonAlphaNumeric = "[^a-zA-Z0-9]";

    String[] words = str.split(" ");
    for(String word : words) {
               word = word.replaceAll(nonAlphaNumeric, "").trim();
        if(word.equalsIgnoreCase(pattern))
            newStr = newStr.replace(word, replaceWith);
    }

        return newStr;      
}