Removing the url from text using java

Question

How to remove the URLs present in text example

String str=\"Fear psychosis after #AssamRiots - http://www.google.com/LdEbWTgD http://www.yahoo.com/mksVZKBz\"         


        

Answer 1

Note that if your URL contains characters like & and \ then the answers above will not work because replaceAll can't handle those characters. What worked for me was to remove those characters in a new string variable then remove those characters from the results of m.find() and use replaceAll on my new string variable.

private String removeUrl(String commentstr)
{
    // rid of ? and & in urls since replaceAll can't deal with them
    String commentstr1 = commentstr.replaceAll("\\?", "").replaceAll("\\&", "");

    String urlPattern = "((https?|ftp|gopher|telnet|file|Unsure|http):((//)|(\\\\))+[\\w\\d:#@%/;$()~_?\\+-=\\\\\\.&]*)";
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile(urlPattern,Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
    Matcher m = p.matcher(commentstr);
    int i = 0;
    while (m.find()) {
        commentstr = commentstr1.replaceAll(m.group(i).replaceAll("\\?", "").replaceAll("\\&", ""),"").trim();
        i++;
    }
    return commentstr;
}