Another way. This has the advantage of being completely independent of ordering of operations, and more replacement string mappings can easily be added to the  %replace hash. 

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = '&  <  >  <  >  &<  &&
+';
 print qq{'$s'};
 ;;
 my %replace = ( amp => '&',  lt  => '<',  gt  => '>', );
 my ($find) =
   map qr{ & ($_) ; }xms,
   join '|',
   keys %replace
   ;
 $s =~ s{$find}{$replace{$1}}xmsg;
 print qq{'$s'};
"
'&amp;  &amp;lt;  &amp;gt;  &lt;  &gt;  &amp;&lt;  &amp;&amp;'
'&  &lt;  &gt;  <  >  &<  &&'

[download]
(But I'm not sure how you would translate this to Java! (Maybe ask on a Java site?))

Update: Here's a variation that has the advantage of avoiding what I think of as 'hidden' capture groups in  qr// objects: captures that can confuse group counting when these objects are used to compose larger regexes. In the following, all captures are at the 'top' level in the  m// match, so counting's easy. 

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = '&amp;  &amp;lt;  &amp;gt;  &lt;  &gt;  &amp;&lt;  &amp;&amp;
+';
 print qq{'$s'};
 ;;
 my %replace = ( amp => '&',  lt  => '<',  gt  => '>', );
 my ($entity) =
   map qr{ $_ }xms,
   join ' | ',
   keys %replace
   ;
 print $entity;
 ;;
 $s =~ s{ & ($entity) ; }{$replace{$1}}xmsg;
 print qq{'$s'};
"
'&amp;  &amp;lt;  &amp;gt;  &lt;  &gt;  &amp;&lt;  &amp;&amp;'
(?^msx: lt | gt | amp )
'&  &lt;  &gt;  <  >  &<  &&'

[download]

In reply to Re: Avoid recursive replacement using regex by AnomalousMonk
in thread Avoid recursive replacement using regex by anirudhkumar_r

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