CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaloopsrepeat
Simo
Simo

Reputation: 23

Is there a way to avoid this repetitive method calling?

I'm using HashMap to count all word instances in an article, I'm trying to remove all non-word characters except spaces(because they're already removed with .split()). Is there a way to not repeat "pWord = pWord.replace(...);" every time and instead loop through and pass different arguments inside parentheses?

pWord = pWord.replace('"', '\"');
pWord = pWord.replace("–", "");
pWord = pWord.replace("\"", "");
pWord = pWord.replace(".", "");
pWord = pWord.replace("-", "");

Upvotes: 0

Views: 131

Answers (2)

Sergei Sirik
Sergei Sirik

Reputation: 1289

One way to achieve this is to use replaceAll with regex. Here is the sample code with regex for characters that you are replacing in your code:

String pWord = "-asdf\\\\adf.asdf\"";
System.out.println(pWord.replaceAll("[(\")(\\\\).-]", ""));

Output:

asdfadfasdf

Also, note that

The String#replaceAll() interprets the argument as a regular expression. The \ is an escape character in both String and regex. You need to double-escape it for regex

P.S. Useful resource to test your regexes: https://regex101.com/

Upvotes: 2

George Z.
George Z.

Reputation: 6808

Another way if you want to remove ALL NON-LETTER characters is to re-write the string ignoring all other symbols.

String s = "hello world _!@#";
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (char c : s.toCharArray()) {
    if (Character.isDigit(c) || Character.isLetter(c) || Character.isWhitespace(c))
        sb.append(c);
}
s = sb.toString();
System.out.println(s);

Upvotes: 1

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