How do you remove all the alphabetic characters from a string?

Question

I have a string containg alphabetic characters, for example:

1. 254.69 meters
2. 26.56 cm
3. 23.36 inches

Answer 1

Use CharMatcher API from Google's Guava library:

String magnitudeWithUnit = "254.69 meter";
String magnitude = CharMatcher.inRange('a', 'z').or(inRange('A', 'Z')).removeFrom(magnitudeWithUnit);

Do static-import CharMatcher.inRange(..). You can trim the results for trailing space.