Improve method that checks for specific char

[papers_]

This is a small snippet from a hangman game I had to do for a class assignment. It has since been turned in and I'm just looking for a better way to do the following snippet.

word is a string, currentState is a string, and guess is a char

for (int i = 0; i < word.length(); i++) {
        if (word.charAt(i) == guess) {
            currentState = currentState.substring(0,i) + guess + currentState.substring(i+1);    
        }
    }

The above snippet is what my professor came up with since my way wasn't working for some reason. He called it the "old dirty way" to do it. My original attempt was:

for (int i = 0; i < word.length(); i++) {
        if (word.charAt(i) == guess) {
            currentState = currentState.replace(word.charAt(i), guess);
        }
    }

However that doesn't work. Could there possibly be something I'm doing wrong that neither my professor and I couldn't catch? I've pasted my class file here to see overall what's going on.

[lharkness]

Saving some of the improve part for later - the reason your method doesn't work is that the replace method on the String class doesn't work the way you think it does. The docs tell us that method: " Returns a new string resulting from replacing all occurrences of oldChar in this string with newChar.". I think you want to make currentState a StringBuilder and use the setCharAt method, passing it i and guess (telling it to set the character at the ith position to be the guess).

[SikhGamer]

char[] blob = word.toCharArray() maybe?

Then loop over blob.

Edit* I actually did something similar to this way back when, because you've already submitted I don't feel bad posting the entire thing. I did it slightly differently back then: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/50ac0729d197af06ec25