Removing special characters from a string

Question

I have a string in my Java program which is read from database.

This may contain special characters in between as below:

Answer 1

You can use String#replaceAll:

myStr = myStr.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z0-9]+", "")

The ^ is saying: "Keep all chars that are not in the specified ranges inside the square brackets".

Answer 2

Try the regex,

String result= yourString.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z0-9]+","");

That gives you the result with only Alpha Numeric.

If you want only Alphabets

String resultWithAlphabetsOnly= yourString.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z]+",""); 

Answer 3

I would write

theString.replaceAll("\\W","");

This will remove everything except for letters, numbers and underscores.