Question

The problem I am attempting to solve is:

Given a string, if one or both of the first 2 chars is ‘x’, return the string without those ‘x’ chars, and otherwise return the string unchanged. This is a little harder than it looks.

withoutX2("xHi") → "Hi" 
withoutX2("Hxi") → "Hi"
withoutX2("Hi") → "Hi"

And the regex solution I have… doesn’t work. I can remove the first x from the word, but removing the second x is a real pain. In this example, I want to know if it is possible to, in regex, to remove the second character without disturbing the others.

Things I’ve tried:

return str.replaceFirst("^.x", "");

This just simply replaces the first two letters with "", which not intended. I only want to replace the second character.

Answer 1

You should allow for the first letter not being an ‘x’:

str.replaceFirst("^xx|^(.{0,1})x", "$1")