I'm trying to use the String.replaceAll() method with regex to only keep letter characters and ['-_]. I'm trying to do this by replacing every character that is neither a letter nor one of the characters above by an empty string.
So far I have tried something like this (in different variations) which correctly keeps letters but replaces the special characters I want to keep:
current = current.replaceAll("(?=\\P{L})(?=[^\\'-_])", "");
Make it simplier :
current = current.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z'_-]", "");
Explanation :
Match any char not in a to z, A to Z, ', _, - and replaceAll() method will replace any matched char with nothing.
Tested input : "a_zE'R-z4r@m"
Output : a_zE'R-zrm
You don't need lookahead, just use negated regex:
current = current.replaceAll("[^\\p{L}'_-]+", "");
[^\\p{L}'_-] will match anything that is not a letter (unicode) or single quote or underscore or hyphen.
Your regex is too complicated. Just specify the characters you want to keep, and use ^ to negate, so [^a-z'_-] means "anything but these".
public class Replacer {
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("with 1234 &*()) -/.,>>?chars".replaceAll("[^\\w'_-]", ""));
}
}
You can try this:
String str = "Se@rbi323a`and_Eur$ope@-t42he-[A%merica]";
str = str.replaceAll("[\\d+\\p{Punct}&&[^-'_\\[\\]]]+", "");
System.out.println("str = " + str);
And it is the result:
str = Serbia'and_Europe-the-[America]
'-_means “any character between'and_”, which is probably not what you want. You should either escape the-or place it last before the].