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Regular expression tips or resources

Posted on 16th Feb 2014 07:03 pm by admin

Hello! I'm having some issues implementing the appropriate regex patter to eliminate unwanted characters from a string.

Here is a sample string:
Code: String str = "test-hello. me please3, _dog[ -()"; What I need to do is create a regex that will take out all non word characters except for spaces AND strings of type "test-hello" - in other words any string that has word or digit characters followed by a "-" (hyphen) followed by more word or digit characters - this is what is giving me trouble.

What I have right now which is perfect except for the "test-hello" type strings is:
Code: Pattern replace = Pattern.compile("([^\w ])");Matcher matcher = replace.matcher(str);str = matcher.replaceAll(""); The above code removes all non word or digit characters except for spaces but it will obviously still remove the "-" in "test-hello".

I'm not looking for the whole answer of course but any tips or resources I can be pointed to would be greatly appreciated. I'm not familiar with the regex syntax in Java as I am in say PHP.

Thank you!

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