Question

    String strLine = "";

    try
    {
        BufferedReader b = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("html.txt"));
        strLine = b.readLine();
    } catch(Exception e)
    {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }   

    String[] temp = strLine.split("<");
    temp = temp[1].split(">");
    String temp1 = ("<"+temp[0]+">");

    strLine = strLine.replaceFirst(temp1,"");
    System.out.println(strLine);

Basically I want to remove this string

<span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA"> 

from from the file that contains

<span title="Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" class="IPA">no'b?l</span> 

However so far my code works only if the string contains no quotes. How can I fix this problem. I have tried using

.replaceAll("\\\"","\\\\\""); 

but still failed.

Any help or info will be greatly apreciated.

Answer 1

Your problem is that replaceFirst accepts a regular expression, but you’re feeding it an arbitrary string, that might contain all sorts of special characters that have a specific meaning in a regular expression. I don’t think the quotes are your problem, but rather the question mark parentheses.

One way to work around this is to use the String#replace method, which accepts a string rather than a regular expression. That is, use the following line:

strLine = strLine.replace(temp1,"");

This differs from your code in that it replaces all the instances of temp1 in that line, and not just the first one, but I think you should be fine with that.