I have a string:
HLN (Formerly Headline News)
I want to remove everything inside the parens and the parens themselves, leaving only:
HLN
I've tried to do this with a regex, but my difficulty is with this pattern:
"(.+?)"
When I use it, it always gives me a PatternSyntaxException. How can I fix my regex?
Because parentheses are special characters in regexps you need to escape them to match them explicitly.
For example:
"\\(.+?\\)"
String foo = "(x)()foo(x)()";
String cleanFoo = foo.replaceAll("\\([^\\(]*\\)", "");
// cleanFoo value will be "foo"
The above removes empty and non-empty parenthesis from either side of the string.
plain regex:
\([^\(]*\)
You can test here: http://www.regexplanet.com/simple/index.html
My code is based on previous answers
You could use the following regular expression to find parentheticals:
\([^)]*\)
the \( matches on a left parenthesis, the [^)]* matches any number of characters other than the right parenthesis, and the \) matches on a right parenthesis.
If you're including this in a java string, you must escape the \ characters like the following:
String regex = "\\([^)]*\\)";
String foo = "bar (baz)";
String boz = foo.replaceAll("\\(.+\\)", ""); // or replaceFirst
boz is now "bar "
