Remove all non- word characters from a String in Java leaving accented characters

Question

Apparently Java s Regex flavor counts Umlauts and other special characters as non- word characters  when I use Regex            TEST  TEST  replaceAll     W          returns  TESTTEST  for me  What I want is for only all truly non- word characters  to be removed  Any way to do this without having something along the lines of              A-Za-z0-9                                   only to realize I forgot

User · Answer

You might want to remove the accents and diacritic signs first  then on each character position check if the  simplified  string is an ascii letter - if it is  the original position shall contain word characters  if not  it can be removed

User · Answer

Well  here is one solution I ended up with  but I hope there s a more elegant one     StringBuilder result   new StringBuilder    for int i 0  i lt name length    i          char tmpChar   name charAt  i        if  Character isLetterOrDigit  tmpChar     tmpChar                    result append  tmpChar              result ends up with the desired result

User · Answer

I was trying to achieve the exact opposite when I bumped on this thread  I know it s quite old  but here s my solution nonetheless  You can use blocks  see here  In this case  compile the following code  with the right imports    gt  String s    quot         blah quot     gt  Pattern p   Pattern compile  quot    p InLatin-1Supplement    quot       this regex uses a block  gt  Matcher m   p matcher s    gt  System out println m find      gt  System out println s replaceAll p pattern     quot   quot      You should see the following output   true  blah  Best

User · Answer

At times you do not want to simply remove the characters  but just remove the accents  I came up with the following utility class which I use in my Java REST web projects whenever I need to include a String in an URL   import java text Normalizer  import java text Normalizer Form   import org apache commons lang StringUtils          Utility class for String manipulation          author Stefan Haberl     public abstract class TextUtils       private static String   searchList                                                     private static String   replaceList      Ae    ae    Oe    oe    Ue    ue                sz                     Normalizes a String by removing all accents to original 127 US-ASCII        characters  This method handles German umlauts and  sharp-s  correctly                 param s                   The String to normalize         return The normalized String             public static String normalize String s            if  s    null              return null           String n   null           n   StringUtils replaceEachRepeatedly s  searchList  replaceList           n   Normalizer normalize n  Form NFD  replaceAll      p ASCII                   return n                        Returns a clean representation of a String which might be used safely        within an URL  Slugs are a more human friendly form of URL encoding a        String          lt p gt         The method first normalizes a String  then converts it to lowercase and        removes ASCII characters  which might be problematic in URLs          lt ul gt          lt li gt all whitespaces         lt li gt dots               lt li gt  semi- colons      and              lt li gt equals               lt li gt ampersands    amp            lt li gt slashes               lt li gt angle brackets    lt   and   gt            lt  ul gt                  param s                   The String to slugify         return The slugified String         see  normalize String              public static String slugify String s             if  s    null              return null           String n   normalize s           n   StringUtils lowerCase n           n   n replaceAll     s    amp   lt  gt                    return n            Being a German speaker I ve included proper handling of German umlauts as well - the list should be easy to extend for other languages   HTH  EDIT  Note that it may be unsafe to include the returned String in an URL  You should at least HTML encode it to prevent XSS attacks

User · Answer

Use    p L  p Nd    - this matches all  Unicode  characters that are neither letters nor  decimal  digits   In Java   String resultString   subjectString replaceAll      p L   p Nd             Edit   I changed  p N  to  p Nd  because the former also matches some number symbols like     the latter doesn t  See it on regex101 com

[java] Remove all non-"word characters" from a String in Java, leaving accented characters?

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