How to remove the first occurance of a sub string in a string in java?

Question

I have a HTML content in the form of String. There are many hyper links in the string. How can I remove only first link in the string? Please guide me.

String html = "abcdef<a href=some dynamic url>link1</a>ghijkl<a href=some url>link2</a>mnopq<a href=some url>link3</a>";

I want to remove the "link1" along with reference url from above string.

If the problem is the 'first occurrence' part - [replaceFirst](http://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/String.html#replaceFirst(java.lang.String,%20java.lang.String)). But do show us an attempt at solving the problem. — Bernhard Barker, Oct 21 '13 at 09:05

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 21 '13 at 09:08

2

I would do something like

String matchATag="<a[^>]*>([^<]+)</a>";
html=html.replaceFirst(matchATag,"");

answered Oct 21 '13 at 09:08

Dhana Krishnasamy

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score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 21 '13 at 09:09

1

You can use a regular expression. Example:

html.replaceFirst("<a[^>]+>[^>]+</a>", "");

answered Oct 21 '13 at 09:09

R. Oosterholt

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score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:59

0

You might try to match the link element with regex, but that's a recipe for problems.

You'd better get an HTML parser like NekoHTML, find the first link, and remove it.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:59

Community

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answered Oct 21 '13 at 09:05

Bozho

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 21 '13 at 09:07

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For html processing i would suggest jsoup (http://jsoup.org/). You can also specify the replacement behaviour in this lib.

answered Oct 21 '13 at 09:07

mkuff

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How to remove the first occurance of a sub string in a string in java?

4 Answers4