Question

I need to test whether character is a letter or a space before moving on further with processing. So, i

    for (Character c : take.toCharArray()) {
        if (!(Character.isLetter(c) || Character.isSpaceChar(c)))
            continue;

        data.append(c);

Once i examined the data, i saw that it contains characters which look like a unicode representation of characters from outside of Latin alphabet. How can i modify the above code to tighten my conditions to only accept letter characters which fall in range of [a-z][A-Z]?

Is Regex a way to go, or there is a better (faster) way?

Answer 1

If you just want to strip out non-ASCII letter characters, then a quick approach is to use String.replaceAll() and Regex:

s.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z]", "")

Can’t say anything about performance vs. a character by character scan and append to StringBuilder, though.