How to remove end of cell special characters from a word document in java regex

Question

I am extracting data from tables within a Microsoft word document (.doc).

The data extracts fine but at the end of each extracted value (from each cell) there is a non-printable ^G character which is seriously messing with further processing. I can only see this when I paste the console output into my text editor (TextMate).

What's the best way to remove this using regex. Is this a unicode character? I cant find any reference to ^G non printable characters. I assume its an end of cell character. To be honest I would rather get rid of all non-printable characters but at the moment this is the only one that is causing my any problems so either solution will do.

Answer 1

To be honest I would rather get rid of all non-printable characters

You may use:

input = input.replaceAll("\\P{Print}", "");

in Java to remove all non-printable characters.

\\p{Print} matches all printable characters (including Unicode ones) and \\P{Print} does the reverse by matching all non-printable characters.