replaceall REGEX in java

Question

Completely new to java and I have been playing around with regex in a replaceAll command and wondered if the way that I have done it is the best way? I basically wanted to find every occurence of <Letter_File TIMESTAMP="0000-00-00 00:00" FILECREATOR="XXX" BRAND_ID="0" BRAND_NAME="xxxxxxxxx"> within my file and replace it with <Letter_File> i am using the following:

str1 = str1.replaceAll("\\<Letter\\_File[a-zA-Z\\_\\s\\=\\\"0-9-\\:\\\"]+\\>","<Letter_File>");>

what I wanted to know, is this the best way of doing the function or is there a way that the REGEX can be shortened?

Any feedback is more then welcome.

Thanks

so basically you are trying to replace the tag <Letter_File TIMESTAMP="0000-00-00 00:00" FILECREATOR="XXX" BRAND_ID="0" BRAND_NAME="xxxxxxxxx"> with <Letter_File> tag in your XML file right ? — Karthikeyan Arumugam
– Karthikeyan Arumugam, Commented Mar 21, 2012 at 15:20
yes correct I basically want to strip all of the attributes out of the <Letter_File> tag, I know that this is probably a very noobish way of doing so! — Simon.Knott86
– Simon.Knott86, Commented Mar 22, 2012 at 9:50

Toto · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-21 15:18:16Z

3

How about:

str1 = str1.replaceAll("<Letter_File[^>]+>","<Letter_File>");>

answered Mar 21, 2012 at 15:18

Toto

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4 Comments

Simon.Knott86 Over a year ago

Thanks this works fine, just out of curiousity could you explain how this works? am I right in assuming that the [^>] will look for anything after the <Letter_File upto the >? I thought that you had to put in the certain characters it looked for hence why I put all of those different variations e.g. a-zA-Z0-9 etc. etc.

Toto Over a year ago

@Simon.Knott86: [^>] means any character that is not >. Have a look at this site: regular-expressions.info/charclass.html

Simon.Knott86 Over a year ago

thanks very much I think that helps alot, I wasnt sure as the ^ character to my understanding can also mean "at the start of"

Toto Over a year ago

@Simon.Knott86: Yes the ^ means start of string except when inside a character class it negates the class.

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