How do you replace all of the characters in a string that do not fit a criteria. I'm having trouble specifically with the NOT operator.
Specifically, I'm trying to remove all characters that are not a digit, I've tried this so far:
String number = "703-463-9281";
String number2 = number.replaceAll("[0-9]!", ""); // produces: "703-463-9281" (no change)
String number3 = number.replaceAll("[0-9]", ""); // produces: "--"
String number4 = number.replaceAll("![0-9]", ""); // produces: "703-463-9281" (no change)
String number6 = number.replaceAll("^[0-9]", ""); // produces: "03-463-9281"
To explain: The ^ at the start of a character class will negate that class But it has to be inside the class for that to work. The same character outside a character class is the anchor for start of string/line instead.
You can try this instead:
"[^0-9]"
Here's a quick cheat sheet of character class definition and how it interacts with some regex meta characters.
[aeiou]
- matches exactly one lowercase vowel
[^aeiou]
- matches a character that ISN'T a lowercase vowel (negated character class)
^[aeiou]
- matches a lowercase vowel anchored at the beginning of the line
[^^]
- matches a character that isn't a caret/'^'
^[^^]
- matches a character that isn't a caret at the beginning of line
^[^.].
- matches anything but a literal period, followed by "any" character, at the beginning of line
[a-z]
- matches exactly one character within the range of 'a'
to 'z'
(i.e. all lowercase letters)
[az-]
- matches either an 'a'
, a 'z'
, or a '-'
(literal dash)
[.*]*
- matches a contiguous sequence (possibly empty) of dots and asterisks
[aeiou]{3}
- matches 3 consecutive lowercase vowels (all not necessarily the same vowel)
\[aeiou\]
- matches the string "[aeiou]"
References
- regular-expressions.info/Character class, Anchors, Dot, Repetition
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