Remove all non-“word characters” from a String in Java, leaving accented characters?

Question

Apparently Java\'s Regex flavor counts Umlauts and other special characters as non-\"word characters\" when I use Regex.

        \"TESTÜTEST\".replaceAll( \"         


        

Answer 1

I was trying to achieve the exact opposite when I bumped on this thread. I know it's quite old, but here's my solution nonetheless. You can use blocks, see here. In this case, compile the following code (with the right imports):

> String s = "äêìóblah"; 
> Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[\\p{InLatin-1Supplement}]+"); // this regex uses a block
> Matcher m = p.matcher(s);
> System.out.println(m.find());
> System.out.println(s.replaceAll(p.pattern(), "#"));

You should see the following output:

true

#blah

Best,

Answer 2

Well, here is one solution I ended up with, but I hope there's a more elegant one...

StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
for(int i=0; i<name.length(); i++) {
    char tmpChar = name.charAt( i );
    if (Character.isLetterOrDigit( tmpChar) || tmpChar == '_' ) {
        result.append( tmpChar );
    }
}

result ends up with the desired result...

Answer 3

You might want to remove the accents and diacritic signs first, then on each character position check if the "simplified" string is an ascii letter - if it is, the original position shall contain word characters, if not, it can be removed.

Answer 4

Use [^\p{L}\p{Nd}]+ - this matches all (Unicode) characters that are neither letters nor (decimal) digits.

In Java:

String resultString = subjectString.replaceAll("[^\\p{L}\\p{Nd}]+", "");

Edit:

I changed \p{N} to \p{Nd} because the former also matches some number symbols like ¼; the latter doesn't. See it on regex101.com.

Answer 5

At times you do not want to simply remove the characters, but just remove the accents. I came up with the following utility class which I use in my Java REST web projects whenever I need to include a String in an URL:

import java.text.Normalizer;
import java.text.Normalizer.Form;

import org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils;

/**
 * Utility class for String manipulation.
 * 
 * @author Stefan Haberl
 */
public abstract class TextUtils {
    private static String[] searchList = { "Ä", "ä", "Ö", "ö", "Ü", "ü", "ß" };
    private static String[] replaceList = { "Ae", "ae", "Oe", "oe", "Ue", "ue",
            "sz" };

    /**
     * Normalizes a String by removing all accents to original 127 US-ASCII
     * characters. This method handles German umlauts and "sharp-s" correctly
     * 
     * @param s
     *            The String to normalize
     * @return The normalized String
     */
    public static String normalize(String s) {
        if (s == null)
            return null;

        String n = null;

        n = StringUtils.replaceEachRepeatedly(s, searchList, replaceList);
        n = Normalizer.normalize(n, Form.NFD).replaceAll("[^\\p{ASCII}]", "");

        return n;
    }

    /**
     * Returns a clean representation of a String which might be used safely
     * within an URL. Slugs are a more human friendly form of URL encoding a
     * String.
     * <p>
     * The method first normalizes a String, then converts it to lowercase and
     * removes ASCII characters, which might be problematic in URLs:
     * <ul>
     * <li>all whitespaces
     * <li>dots ('.')
     * <li>(semi-)colons (';' and ':')
     * <li>equals ('=')
     * <li>ampersands ('&')
     * <li>slashes ('/')
     * <li>angle brackets ('<' and '>')
     * </ul>
     * 
     * @param s
     *            The String to slugify
     * @return The slugified String
     * @see #normalize(String)
     */
    public static String slugify(String s) {

        if (s == null)
            return null;

        String n = normalize(s);
        n = StringUtils.lowerCase(n);
        n = n.replaceAll("[\\s.:;&=<>/]", "");

        return n;
    }
}

Being a German speaker I've included proper handling of German umlauts as well - the list should be easy to extend for other languages.

HTH

EDIT: Note that it may be unsafe to include the returned String in an URL. You should at least HTML encode it to prevent XSS attacks.