Is there a way to avoid this repetitive method calling?

Question

I'm using HashMap to count all word instances in an article, I'm trying to remove all non-word characters except spaces(because they're already removed with .split()). Is there a way to not repeat "pWord = pWord.replace(...);" every time and instead loop through and pass different arguments inside parentheses?

pWord = pWord.replace('"', '\"');
pWord = pWord.replace("–", "");
pWord = pWord.replace("\"", "");
pWord = pWord.replace(".", "");
pWord = pWord.replace("-", "");

You have `pWord.replace("–", "");` twice, by the way. And your call to `pWord.replace('"', '\"');` is useless since you're calling `pWord.replace("\"", "");` right after it. — Jacob G., Feb 13 '19 at 21:56
Sure, there is a way. Just create some collection of symbols you want to replace and go over it in a loop and execute replace with current symbol from this collection. — Sergei Sirik, Feb 13 '19 at 21:57
I’m no regex expert but something like `pWord = pWord=replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z\\s]", "");`. — achAmháin, Feb 13 '19 at 21:58
Also, you can take a look at this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9295621/string-how-to-replace-multiple-possible-characters-with-a-single-character — Sergei Sirik, Feb 13 '19 at 21:58
@achAmháin i like this one... replace all not lower not upper and not space with empty string. — mavriksc, Feb 13 '19 at 22:00

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 13 '19 at 22:10

One way to achieve this is to use replaceAll with regex. Here is the sample code with regex for characters that you are replacing in your code:

String pWord = "-asdf\\\\adf.asdf\"";
System.out.println(pWord.replaceAll("[(\")(\\\\).-]", ""));

Output:

asdfadfasdf

Also, note that

The String#replaceAll() interprets the argument as a regular expression. The \ is an escape character in both String and regex. You need to double-escape it for regex

P.S. Useful resource to test your regexes: https://regex101.com/

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 13 '19 at 22:07

Another way if you want to remove ALL NON-LETTER characters is to re-write the string ignoring all other symbols.

String s = "hello world _!@#";
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
for (char c : s.toCharArray()) {
    if (Character.isDigit(c) || Character.isLetter(c) || Character.isWhitespace(c))
        sb.append(c);
}
s = sb.toString();
System.out.println(s);

Is there a way to avoid this repetitive method calling?

2 Answers2