Question

I would like to remove all substrings from a string in java that begin with a specific text and end with a specific text (example )

so i would like to remove

<tag> And everything in between  </endTag>

I have end line characters in between the tags.
There are multiple things i want to remove but one of them begins with

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW ?

and ends with

<end>

I have tried

text = text.replaceAll("WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW \\?.*?<end>", "");

but it didnt work

text = text.replaceAll("CHAPTER 18" , ""); works

Here is a chunk (just an example there are more of those) of text that i want to replace (it is an exert from a book from human sexuality calss so dont read it if you feel uncomfortable but i feel like there isnt anything in it that is inappropriate)

 (Tons of text here) WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW ?
    Most kids today know all about sex at an early 
    age. So why are people so uptight about 
    showing nudity on television? What do they 
    think it will do to their kids?
    Even in a society like ours, which has begun to discuss sex 
    more openly, it is still a diffi cult subject for children to 
    understand. Many parents believe that it is their job to 
    introduce the topic to their children, to explain it to them, 
    and to teach their children whatever values the parents 
    believe are appropriate. This may be undermined when 
    children see fairly uncensored sexuality on television, which 
    is usually shown without any discussion of values and 
    without any way to address the children’s questions about 
    what they are seeing. In the accompanying Sex in Real Life, 
    “Generation M,” we talk about research on the media 
    consumption habits of children and teenagers.
    REALResearch > Studies have shown that people are less 
    likely to remember the brand name of a product in an ad with sex 
    and violence than in an ad without (BUSHMAN & BONACCI, 2002).
    <end> (tons of text here) 

Could it be something in the way my text is formatter that doesnt allow the replaceAll to work??

UPDATE:

Its definetly the end line characters
I removed them and it works. But i would still like to keep my end line characters is there any way i can do that ??

Answer 1

String s = "text that needs WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW ? " +
        "more text that needs deletion <end>to stay";
System.out.println(s.replaceAll("(?s)WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW \\?.*?<end>", ""));

Output:

text that needs to stay