Question

I am struggling to implement the following,

lets say I have string :

 ( z )  ( A ( z )  ( A ( z )  ( A ( z )  ( A ( z )  ( A )  )  )  )  ) 

I want to write a regex that takes out all characters that have a braked to their left and right. i.e. I would like this to return:

 ( z ) ( z ) ( z ) ( z ) ( z ) ( A ) 

I have tried a combination of regex’s like: (\\s\\S( \\W \\)\\s\\S)

thanks
daniel

Answer 1

This expression should work:

Pattern.compile("\\(\\s*\\w+\\s*\\)").matcher(input);

Literal parens need to be escaped in the regex and I think you’ve got a few extra ingredients there. The regex I show allows whitespace before and after the word chars contained within parens.