Remove “empty” character from String

Question

I\'m using a framwork which returns malformed Strings with \"empty\" characters from time to time.

\"foobar\" for example is represented by: [,f,o,o,b,a,r]

T

Answer 1

Regex would be an appropriate way to sanitize the string from unwanted Unicode characters in this case.

String sanitized = dirty.replaceAll("[\uFEFF-\uFFFF]", ""); 

This will replace all char in \uFEFF-\uFFFF range with the empty string.

The [...] construct is called a character class, e.g. [aeiou] matches one of any of the lowercase vowels, [^aeiou] matches anything but.

You can do one of these two approaches:

• replaceAll("[blacklist]", "")
• replaceAll("[^whitelist]", "")

References

• regular-expressions.info