How to redact email & telephone info from text?

Question

Is there a regex way of redacting email & telephone info from this text:

Hi John,
Please contact me at tom@email.com or 212-555-1212 or 313.555.1313.
Thank you.
Tom

so that it becomes this:

Hi John,
Please contact me at [REDACTED] or [REDACTED] or [REDACTED].
Thank you.
Tom

Answer 1

Use String.replaceAll(). You can use this regex for matching email addresses:

[^@\s]+@[^@\s]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}

And this one for phone numbers:

\d{3}[-.]\d{3}[-.]\d{4}

A greater variety of phone number formats could be supported, but I only covered the examples in your question.

Here is a little test program to prove the above works:

public class Redacted {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String text = "Hi John,\n"
            + "Please contact me at tom@email.com or 212-555-1212 or 313.555.1313.\n"
            + "Thank you.\n"
            + "Tom";
        System.out.println("Before:\n" + text + "\n");
        // replace email addresses
        text = text.replaceAll("[^@\\s]+@[^@\\s]+\\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}", "[REDACTED]");
        // replace phone numbers
        text = text.replaceAll("\\d{3}[-.]\\d{3}[-.]\\d{4}", "[REDACTED]");
        System.out.println("After:\n" + text + "\n");
    }
}

The above program outputs:

Before:
Hi John,
Please contact me at tom@email.com or 212-555-1212 or 313.555.1313.
Thank you.
Tom

After:
Hi John,
Please contact me at [REDACTED] or [REDACTED] or [REDACTED].
Thank you.
Tom

Answer 2

java.util.regex.Matcher has a replaceAll method.