How can I remove all leading and trailing punctuation?

Question

I want to remove all the leading and trailing punctuation in a string. How can I do this?

Basically, I want to preserve punctuation in between words, and I need to r

Answer 1

You could use a regular expression:

private static final Pattern PATTERN =
    Pattern.compile("^\\p{Punct}*(.*?)\\p{Punct}*$");

public static String trimPunctuation(String s) {
  Matcher m = PATTERN.matcher(s);
  m.find();
  return m.group(1);
}

The boundary matchers ^ and $ ensure the whole input is matched.

A dot . matches any single character.

A star * means "match the preceding thing zero or more times".

The parentheses () define a capturing group whose value is retrieved by calling Matcher.group(1).

The ? in (.*?) means you want the match to be non-greedy, otherwise the trailing punctuation would be included in the group.