How do I java regex find and replace

Question

What's the regex for removing parentheses and everything between?

input  = "hello world (this is a test1) (test 2) hello";
output = "hello world   hello";

I tried:

str.replaceAll("//(.*?//)", "");

Answer 1

You are using forward slash characters to escape the ( and ) special characters. You need to use backslashes:

String output = input.replaceAll("\\(.*?\\)", "");