Named placeholders in string formatting

StrSubstitutor of jakarta commons lang is a light weight way of doing this provided your values are already formatted correctly.

http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-lang/javadocs/api-3.1/org/apache/commons/lang3/text/StrSubstitutor.html

Map<String, String> values = new HashMap<String, String>();
values.put("value", x);
values.put("column", y);
StrSubstitutor sub = new StrSubstitutor(values, "%(", ")");
String result = sub.replace("There's an incorrect value '%(value)' in column # %(column)");

The above results in:

"There's an incorrect value '1' in column # 2"

When using Maven you can add this dependency to your pom.xml:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.commons</groupId>
    <artifactId>commons-lang3</artifactId>
    <version>3.4</version>
</dependency>

not quite, but you can use MessageFormat to reference one value multiple times:

MessageFormat.format("There's an incorrect value \"{0}\" in column # {1}", x, y);

The above can be done with String.format() as well, but I find messageFormat syntax cleaner if you need to build complex expressions, plus you dont need to care about the type of the object you are putting into the string

Another example of Apache Common StringSubstitutor for simple named placeholder.

String template = "Welcome to {theWorld}. My name is {myName}.";

Map<String, String> values = new HashMap<>();
values.put("theWorld", "Stackoverflow");
values.put("myName", "Thanos");

String message = StringSubstitutor.replace(template, values, "{", "}");

System.out.println(message);

// Welcome to Stackoverflow. My name is Thanos.

You can use StringTemplate library, it offers what you want and much more.

import org.antlr.stringtemplate.*;

final StringTemplate hello = new StringTemplate("Hello, $name$");
hello.setAttribute("name", "World");
System.out.println(hello.toString());