CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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Coding Duchess
Coding Duchess

Reputation: 6899

Remove special characters from a string except whitespace

I am looking for a regular expression to remove all special characters from a string, except whitespace. And maybe replace all multi- whitespaces with a single whitespace.

For example "[one@ !two three-four]" should become "one two three-four"

I tried using str = Regex.Replace(strTemp, "^[-_,A-Za-z0-9]$", "").Trim() but it does not work. I also tried few more but they either get rid of the whitespace or do not replace all the special characters.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 20373

Answers (3)

Inside 4ndroid
Inside 4ndroid

Reputation: 175

METHOD:

instead of trying to use replace use replaceAll eg :

String InputString= "[one@ !two    three-four]";

String testOutput = InputString.replaceAll("[\\[\\-!,*)@#%(&$_?.^\\]]", "").replaceAll("( )+", " ");

Log.d("THE OUTPUT", testOutput);

This will give an output of one two three-four.

EXPLANATION:

.replaceAll("[\\[\\-!,*)@#%(&$_?.^\\]]", "") this replaces ALL the special characters present between the first and last brackets[]

.replaceAll("( )+", " ") this replaces more than 1 whitespace with just 1 whitespace

REPLACING THE - symbol:

just add the symbol to the regex like this .replaceAll("[\\[\\-!,*)@#%(&$_?.^\\]]", "")

Hope this helps :)

Upvotes: 0

missa
missa

Reputation: 1

Use the regex [^\w\s] to remove all special characters other than words and white spaces, then replace:

Regex.Replace("[one@ !two three-four]", "[^\w\s]", "").Replace("  ", " ").Trim

Upvotes: 0

vks
vks

Reputation: 67968

[ ](?=[ ])|[^-_,A-Za-z0-9 ]+

Try this.See demo.Replace by empty string.See demo.

http://regex101.com/r/lZ5mN8/69

Upvotes: 10

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