For loop breaking out instead of repeating

Stevie :

I'm writing code to create a java template library. I'm writing a specific piece of code where a reader will read the text of the template and pull out placeholders ("${placeholder}). So far, when Jtesting, it seemed to work with a single placeholder, but when I try more than one, the code doesn't seem to loop back and read the rest of the template.

I can't, for the life of me, see why the code is failing.

I've debugged the code, and all I can see is that when it stored the first placeholder, it's not looping back, but instead it's dropping out.

Code is as follows:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.Reader;

public class placeholderFinder {
    private Reader reader;

    public placeholderFinder(Reader reader) {
        this.reader = reader;
    }

    public static final int NORMALTEXT = 0;
    public static final int PLACEHOLDERTEXT = 1;

    private int state = NORMALTEXT;
    private StringBuilder placeholder = new StringBuilder();

    public String nextPlaceholderFinder() throws IOException {
        for (int p = reader.read(); p != -1; p = reader.read()) {
            if (p == '$') {
                if (state == NORMALTEXT) {
                    state = PLACEHOLDERTEXT; 
                    placeholder.append((char) p);
                } 
            } else if (state == PLACEHOLDERTEXT) {
                        placeholder.append((char) p);
                    }

            if (p == '}') {
                    if (state == PLACEHOLDERTEXT) {
                        state = NORMALTEXT;
                        String placeholderStore = placeholder.toString();
                        placeholder.setLength(0);
                        return placeholderStore;

                    }

                }

            }

        return null;

    }

}

And the Jtest

@Test
void testWithPlaceholders() throws IOException {
    Reader reader = new StringReader("a ${name} ${date}");
    placeholderFinder finder = new placeholderFinder(reader);
    String expectedresult = "${name}${date}";
    String actualcode = finder.nextPlaceholderFinder();
    assertEquals(expectedresult, actualcode);

Titus :

Your current solution return after the first placeholder is found, you can change it to go through all the characters in the reader before returning. Here is an example:

public String nextPlaceholderFinder() throws IOException {
    for (int p = reader.read(); p != -1; p = reader.read()) {
        if (p == '$') {
            if (state == NORMALTEXT) {
                state = PLACEHOLDERTEXT; 
                placeholder.append((char) p);
            } 
        } else if (state == PLACEHOLDERTEXT) {
            placeholder.append((char) p);
        }
        if (p == '}') {
            if (state == PLACEHOLDERTEXT) {
                state = NORMALTEXT;
            }
        }
    }
    return placeholder.toString();
}