Replacing certain combination of characters

Question

I'm trying to remove the first bad characters (CAP letter + dot + Space) of this.

A. Shipping Length of Unit
C. OVERALL HEIGHT
Overall Weigth
X. Max Cutting Height

I tried something like that, but it doesn't work:

string.replaceAll("[A-Z]+". ", "");

The result should look like this:

Shipping Length of Unit
OVERALL HEIGHT
Overall Weigth
Max Cutting Height

Answer 1

This should work:

string.replaceAll("^[A-Z]\\. ", "")

Examples

"A. Shipping Length of Unit".replaceAll("^[A-Z]\\. ", "")
// => "Shipping Length of Unit"
"Overall Weigth".replaceAll("^[A-Z]\\. ", "")
// => "Overall Weigth"

Answer 2

input.replaceAll("[A-Z]\\.\\s", "");

[AZ] matches an upper case character from A to Z
\\. matches the dot character
\\s matches any white space character

However, this will replace every character sequence that matches the pattern. For matching a sequence at the beginning you should use

input.replaceAll("^[A-Z]\\.\\s", "");

Answer 3

Try this :

myString.replaceAll("([A-Z]\\.\\s)","")

• [AZ] : match a single character in the range between A and Z.
• \\. : match the dot character.
• \\s : match the space character.

Answer 4

Without looking your code it is hard to tell the problem. but from my experience this is the common problem which generally we make in our initial days:

String string = "A. Test String";
string.replaceAll("^[A-Z]\\. ", "");
System.out.println(string);

String is an immutable class in Java. what it means once you have create a object it can not be changed. so here when we do replaceAll in existing String it simply create a new String Object. that you need to assign to a new variable or overwrite existing value something like below :

String string = "A. Test String";
string  = string.replaceAll("^[A-Z]\\. ", "");
System.out.println(string);