Question

So I recently opened a question and ended up solving it by using a regex. The regex I used essentially ate ALL my non-english characters.

Let me retry this:

I want to eat all non-keyboard characters that may exist in a string

the regex that I’m using is:

[^\\p{L}\\p{N}]

However this turns stuff like

10/10/2012 10:51:25 AM

into

10102012105125AM

Is there some way to easily exclude all alt-code characters from a string with replaceALL and leave keyboard characters like % / \ : and others intact?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You probably want to save only the ASCII characters. The character range [ -~] will achieve that. If you also want whitespace chars, you can add them in: [ -~\s].

System.out.println(input.replaceAll("[^ -~\\s]+", ""));