remove substring in a string without using regex (cannot use replaceAll)

Question

I need to remove some substrings in strings (in a large dataset). The substrings often contain special characters, like these: ., ^, /,... and replaceAll() would treat them as s

Answer 1

You can match literally. For instance, if we want to match "<.]}^", we can do:

Pattern pat=Pattern.compile("<.]}^", PATTERN.LITERAL");

and use that pattern.

You can also use backslashes to escape it. Note that the string literal itself needs backslashes, so escaping a single dot will take two backslashes, as follows:

Pattern pat=Pattern.compile("\\.");

First backslash is seen by compiler, and second backslash is taken as a backslash for the regex parser.