How to filter a Java String to get only alphabet characters?

Question

I\'m generating a XML file to make payments and I have a constraint for user\'s full names. That param only accept alphabet characters (a-ZAZ) + whitespaces to separe names

Answer 1

You can use this removeAccents method with a later replaceAll with [^A-Za-z ]:

public static String removeAccents(String text) {
  return text == null ? null :
    Normalizer.normalize(text, Form.NFD)
        .replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", "");
}

The Normalizer decomposes the original characters into a combination of a base character and a diacritic sign (this could be multiple signs in different languages). á, é and í have the same sign: 0301 for marking the ' accent.

The \p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+ regular expression will match all such diacritic codes and we will replace them with an empty string.

And in the caller:

String original = "Carmen López-Delina Santos";
String res = removeAccents(original).replaceAll("[^A-Za-z ]", "");
System.out.println(res);

See IDEONE demo