Question

I am running into some problems using the regular expression. Can you please help me out?
The following in the problem I am trying to solve –

Input - :,... :(..:::))How are you today?..:(
Output - :( :) How are you today :(

Basically I want to remove the punctuations from the input string like-(.,:; etc) and replace them with empty string. But I want to keep the smilies -:) or 🙁 .I have written the following code but it is not working.

String s = ":,... :(..:::))How are you today?..:( ";  
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile("^(\\Q:)\\E|\\Q:(\\E)(\\p{P}+)");  
Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(s);    
s = matcher.replaceAll("");

Thank You.

Answer 1

Try something like this:

[\p{P}&&[^:()]]|:(?![()])|(?<!:)[()]

A quick break down:

[\p{P}&&[^:()]]    # any punctuation mark except ':', '(' and ')'
|                  # OR
:(?![()])          # a ':' not followed by '(' or ')'
|                  # OR
(?<!:)[()]         # a '(' or ')' not preceded by ':'

Note that the [ ... && [^ ... ]] (set subtraction) is unique to Java’s regex implementation. See: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html