How can I replace a string in parentheses using a regex?

Question

I have a string:

HLN (Formerly Headline News)

I want to remove everything inside the parens and the parens themselves, leaving only:

<

Answer 1

You could use the following regular expression to find parentheticals:

\([^)]*\)

the \( matches on a left parenthesis, the [^)]* matches any number of characters other than the right parenthesis, and the \) matches on a right parenthesis.

If you're including this in a java string, you must escape the \ characters like the following:

String regex = "\\([^)]*\\)";