Minecraft setblock chest cannot use replace

Question

I am aware that ordinarily in Minecraft one can use:

\setblock x y z minecraft:block0 0 replace minecraft:blockname1

to set a block with the ID name: block0 on the coordinate, but only if the block which was before has ID name: block1; this does however not seem to be the case if the block I desire to set is chest (or other blocks which can contain things, such as for instance hoppers). If I type

\setblock x y z minecraft:chest

it works fine

\setblock x y z minecraft:chest 0 replace

works as well; however

\setblock x y z minecraft:chest 0 replace minecraft:block1

(of course I don't write block1, I instead use any real blockname)

fails with the error message:

Data tag parsing failed: Invalid tag encountered, expected '{' as first char.

I have (obviously) attempted this:

\setblock x y z minecraft:chest 0 {} replace minecraft:block1

Which does cause chest to be placed, but it does however not only do if the block that was there before had ID name: block1.

My question: Is there a way to use the setblock command to set a chest (or other item containing blocks) but only if it replaces a specific other block?

Answer 1

/setblock does not support replacing specific blocks. The /fill command does:

/fill x1 y1 z1 x2 y2 z2 block1 0 replace block2 0

However, if "block1" is a tile entity, then you cannot replace a specific block and must instead supply NBT data. See this explanation by Searge:

Replacing blocks with tile entities is not supported, this is due to a limitation in the parsing of commands. It may be changed in the future, but not until after 1.8.

A chest is a tile entity, meaning you cannot use this to replace a specific block with a chest.

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As a work-around, you could detect the existence of the particular block first using /testforblock:

/testforblock x y z minecraft:stone 0

And then use /setblock if that command succeeded:

/setblock x y z minecraft:chest