.replaceAll()

The .replaceAll()
method replaces every match of a specified regular expression with a given string.
Syntax
string.replaceAll(regex, repl);
regex
: A string that defines the regular expression pattern.repl
: The string that will replace every occurrence of the pattern found in the original string.
Note: If the objective is to search and replace a sequence of plain text without using a regex pattern, use the
.replace()
method.
Example
The example below sanitizes a user inputted phone number by removing any non-digit characters:
public class Main {public static void main(String[] args) {String phoneNumber = "(123) 456-7890";String sanitizedPhoneNumber = sanitizePhoneNumber(phoneNumber);System.out.println(sanitizedPhoneNumber);}public static String sanitizePhoneNumber(String number) {return number.replaceAll("[^0-9]", "");}}
Note: When using regex metacharacters (e.g.
.
,*
,+
,?
,^
,$
,\\
) in therepl
string, useMatcher.quoteReplacement(String)
to ensure they are interpreted literally.
In this example, sanitizePhoneNumber
is a method that takes a phone number and removes any non-digit characters. In the replaceAll()
method, the [^0-9]
pattern is passed for the regex
argument and ""
for the repl
argument. This means that every non-digit character will be replaced with an empty string. Then the sanitized phone number is printed to the console:
1234567890
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