Question

I am looking for a regex pattern in Java that corresponds to all characters except the letters a to z.

In other words, I want a regex pattern that corresponds to symbols such as

 !"#¤%&/()=?`´\}}][{€$@

Or some way to trim a string into letters only.

As an example lets consider the following string:

 "one!#"¤%()=) two}]}[()\ three[{€$"

to:

 "one two three"

Answer 1

The Unicode version would be

\PL

\PL are all Unicode code points that does not have the property “Letter”.

\pL would be the counterpart, all Unicode code points that does have the property “Letter”.

Maybe you can fine here on regular-expressions.info some properties that match your needs better.

You can also combine them into character classes, the same than you would handle predefined classes, e.g.

[^\pl\pN]

Would match any character that is not a letter or a digit numeric character in Unicode.