I need to strip off all the leading and trailing characters from a string upto the first and last digit respectively.
Example : OBC9187A-1%A
Should return : 9187A-1
How do I achieve this in Java?
I understand regex is the solution, but I am not good at it.
I tried this replaceAll("([^0-9.*0-9])","")
But it returns only digits and strips all the alpha/special characters.
Here is a self-contained example of using regex and java to solve your problem. I would suggest looking at a regex tutorial of some kind here is a nice one.
public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException {
String test = "OBC9187A-1%A";
Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\d.*\\d");
Matcher m = p.matcher(test);
while (m.find()) {
System.out.println("Match: " + m.group());
}
}
Output:
Match: 9187A-1
\d matches any digit .* matches anything 0 or more times \d matches any digit. The reason we use \\d is to escape the \ for Java since \ is a special character...So this regex will match a digit followed by anything followed by another digit. This is greedy so it will take the longest/largest/greediest match so it will get the first and last digit and anything in between. The while loop is there because if there was more than 1 match it would loop through all matches. In this case there can only be 1 match so you can leave the while loop or change to if like this:
if(m.find())
{
System.out.println("Match: " + m.group());
}
replaceAll there are 2 examples below but since you are trying to pull out a match from the String I would use the Pattern and Matcher to match a portion of your String. This allows you to keep the original String if you want or you can replace it myString = m.group(); with the matched String.This will strip leading and trailing non-digit characters from string s.
String s = "OBC9187A-1%A";
s = s.replaceAll("^\\D+", "").replaceAll("\\D+$", "");
System.out.println(s);
// prints 9187A-1
Regex explanation
^\D+
^ assert position at start of the string
\D+ match any character that's not a digit [^0-9]
Quantifier: + Between one and unlimited times, as many times as possible
\D+$
\D+ match any character that's not a digit [^0-9]
Quantifier: + Between one and unlimited times, as many times as possible
$ assert position at end of the string
Regexwould be a good place to start...digitone or more of any charactersdigit. This doesn't seem like very complex thing.