I'm new to regular expressions in Java (or any language, for that matter) and I'm wanting to do a find using them. The tricky part that I don't understand how to do is replace something inside the string that matches. For example, if the line I'm looking for is Person item6 [can {item thing [wrap]}] I'm able to write a regex that finds that line, but finding what the word "thing" is (as it may differ among different lines) is my problem. I may want to either replace that word with something else or save it in a variable for later. Is there any easy way to do this using Java's regex engine?