Question

I’ve been reading through regex and I thought this would work but it doesn’t seem to want to work. All I need to do is strip the leading 1 off a phone number if it exists.

So:

def mphone = 1+555-555-5555
mphone.replace(/^1/, "")

Shouldn’t this output [phone]?

Answer 1

I recognize two errors in your code. First one is probably a typo: you are not surrounding the phone number with quotation marks so it’s an integer: 1 + 555 – 555 – 5555 = -5554

Also, you should use replaceFirst since there’s no method replace in String taking a Pattern as first parameter. This works:

def mphone = "1+555-555-5555"
result = mphone.replaceFirst(/^1/, "")