Question

I know of using this:

public String RemoveTag(String html){
    html = html.replaceAll("\\<.*?>","");
    html = html.replaceAll("&nbsp;","");
    html = html.replaceAll("&amp;","");
    return html;
}

This removes all tags within an html string. However the question is how does it get a wild characters in between <.*?>. Could someone give me a more detailed explanation on how getting wild characters in String.

The main reason for this is that I still have this characters that has “an @ at start point and } at end point” and I want to get rid of everything in between "@" and "}".

Answer 1

The first parameter to replaceAll(…) is a regex string. The .*? in your example is the part that matches anything. So, if you want a regular expression that will get rid of everything between “@” and “}” you would use something like:

String exampleText = "Start @some text} finish.";
exampleText.replaceAll("@(.*?)\\}", "@}");
System.out.println(exampleText); // prints "Start @} finish."

Notice the same pattern: .*?. The parentheses, which are optional here, are just used for grouping. Also notice the } is escaped with backslashes since it can have special meaning within regular expressions.

For more info on Java’s regex support see the Pattern class.