Remove an apostrophe at the beginning or at the end of a word with regex

Question

I have a list of String that contains word. Some words have apostrophe at the beginning or/and at the end like this:

apple
\'orange
banana\'
joe\'s
         


        

Answer 1

If you plan to remove single quotes at the start or end of the line, you need to enable multiline mode (e.g. you may do it with an inline modifier (?m)):

(?m)^'|'$

As ^ and $ are anchors, zero-width assertions, you need no lookarounds to enclose these anchors with.

If you really plan to match ' that are not enclosed with word chars, use a word boundary based solution:

\B'\b|\b'\B

See the regex demo

Details:

• \B'\b - a ' that is preceded with a non-word boundary (there can be start of string or a non-word char immediately before ') and followed with a word boundary (there must be a word char after ')
• | - or
• \b'\B - a ' that is preceded with a word boundary and is followed with a non-word boundary.

In Java, do not forget to use double backslashes with \b and \B:

myString = myString.replaceAll("\\B'\\b|\\b'\\B", "");

Answer 2

I understand my mistake, I forgot to make the assignment…

myString = myString.replaceAll("(\B'\b)|(\b'\B)", "");

Thank you and sorry for this dumb question.