I've used the following regex to try to remove parentheses and everything within them in a string called name.
name.replaceAll("\\(.*\\)", "");
For some reason, this is leaving name unchanged. What am I doing wrong?
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7 Answers
Strings are immutable. You have to do this:
name = name.replaceAll("\\(.*\\)", "");
Edit: Also, since the .* is greedy, it will kill as much as it can. So "(abc)something(def)" will be turned into "".
2 Comments
Tikhon Jelvis
Actually, as I think about it a bit more, nesting won't be an issue because the
.* is greedy by default. The real issue is with strings like (abc) (def) which will be deleted completely.
Daniel
Also not a problem in my situation. There will never be more than one set of parentheses.
As mentionend by by Jelvis, ".*" selects everything and converts "(ab) ok (cd)" to ""
The version below works in these cases "(ab) ok (cd)" -> "ok", by selecting everything except the closing parenthesis and removing the whitespaces.
test = test.replaceAll("\\s*\\([^\\)]*\\)\\s*", " ");
1 Comment
Saheb
This fails when
test="(text(some more text ) then some more )".String.replaceAll() doesn't edit the original string, but returns the new one. So you need to do:
name = name.replaceAll("\\(.*\\)", "");
Comments
If you read the Javadoc for String.replaceAll(), you'll notice that it specifies that the resulting string is the return value.
More generally, Strings are immutable in Java; they never change value.
answered Nov 21, 2011 at 0:49
Oliver Charlesworth
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Comments
I'm using this function:
public static String remove_parenthesis(String input_string, String parenthesis_symbol){
// removing parenthesis and everything inside them, works for (),[] and {}
if(parenthesis_symbol.contains("[]")){
return input_string.replaceAll("\\s*\\[[^\\]]*\\]\\s*", " ");
}else if(parenthesis_symbol.contains("{}")){
return input_string.replaceAll("\\s*\\{[^\\}]*\\}\\s*", " ");
}else{
return input_string.replaceAll("\\s*\\([^\\)]*\\)\\s*", " ");
}
}
You can call it like this:
remove_parenthesis(g, "[]");
remove_parenthesis(g, "{}");
remove_parenthesis(g, "()");
Comments
To get around the .* removing everything in between two sets of parentheses you can try :
name = name.replaceAll("\\(?.*?\\)", "");
Comments
In Kotlin we must use toRegex.
val newName = name.replace("\\(?.*?\\)".toRegex(), "");
