Remove non-ASCII non-printable characters from a String

Question

I get user input including non-ASCII characters and non-printable characters, such as

\\xc2d
\\xa0
\\xe7
\\xc3\\ufffdd
\\xc3\\ufffdd
\\xc2\\xa0
\\xc3\\xa7
         


        

Answer 1

I know it's maybe late but for future reference:

String clean = str.replaceAll("\\P{Print}", "");

Removes all non printable characters, but that includes \n (line feed), \t(tab) and \r(carriage return), and sometimes you want to keep those characters.

For that problem use inverted logic:

String clean = str.replaceAll("[^\\n\\r\\t\\p{Print}]", "");