Replace with Regular Expression in Java

Question

I have a text like (:year) i want to extract the year and replace it with 1. I am using

replaceAll("\\:[a-z A-Z]+?($|\\W)", "1");

This gives me the answer(1. It removes the closing bracket. What change should i make to exclude this closing bracket.

Input may be like (:year), :year , :year xxxx, and :year may be at the end of string. Using this in JAVA

Answer 1

replaceAll("\\:[a-zA-Z]+\\b", "1");

Simply use \b or word boundary.See demo.

https://regex101.com/r/uF4oY4/71

Answer 2

Turn the second group as positive lookahead. Positive lookahead are assertions which won't capture any characters but asserts whether a match is possible or not.

string.replaceAll("\\:[a-z A-Z]+?(?=$|\\W)", "1");