Is there a quick way to refactor the entire codebase to adopt a different code convention?

Question

I have received ownership of a code base that, although very well written, uses a rather bizarre convention:

public void someMethod(String pName, Integer pAge, Context pContext) 
{ 
    ... 
}

I'd like to make the following two changes to the entire code:

public void someMethod(String name, Integer age, Context context) { ... }

1. Opening bracket in the same line of the method declaration
2. Use a camelCase name for all parameters of the method, without this weird "p" prefix

Can checkstyle help me here? I'm looking but I can't find a way to rename all parameters in all method signatures to something more pleasant.

Answer 1

If you are willing to use the eclipse IDE it'd offer a very handy feature for auto-formatting code:

http://help.eclipse.org/juno/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.jdt.doc.user%2Freference%2Fpreferences%2Fjava%2Fcodestyle%2Fref-preferences-formatter.htm

It is pretty self-explanatory and straight-forward in my opinion.

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Eclipse allows for regex based search and replace operations.

Just open Search > File... there enter the following regex for Containing text:

\b[p]([A-Z][a-z]+)\b

And tick both Case sensitive and Regular expression. Then press Replace...

In the newly popped up window enter

\1

in the With: field and tick Regular expression.

Edit: Sadly in its current version Eclipse does not support the \L flag for content groups so you are still stuck with an uppercase leading letter.

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To answer your question about checkstyle: No, checkstyle is a tool used for analyzing code not for changing.

Using checkstyle to format code (Question from Oct'12)

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Also did some research, here's another stackoverflow question aiming at the practically same. The solution offered there is similarly work intensive.

Can I automatically refactor an entire java project and rename uppercase method parameters to lowercase? (Question from Oct'10)