Question

I need to scroll a List and removing all strings that contains some special char. Using RegEx I’m able to remove all string that start with these special chars but, how can I find if this special char is in the middle of the string?

For instance:

Pattern.matches("[()<>/;\\*%$].*", "(123)") 

returns true and I can remove this string

but it doesn’t works with this kind of string: 12(3).

Is it correct to use \* to find the occurrence of “*” char into the string?

Thanks for the help!
Andrea

Answer 1

You are yet another victim of Java’s ill-named .matches() which tries and match the whole input and contradicts the very definition of regex matching.

What you want is matching one character among ()<>/;\\*%$. With Java, you need to create a Pattern, a Matcher from this Pattern and use .find() on this matcher:

final Pattern p = pattern.compile("[()<>/;\\*%$]");

final Matcher m = p.matcher(yourinput);

if (m.find()) // match, proceed