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

Answer 2

trim left or right removes white spaces. does it has a colon before space?

even more: a=(long) string[0]; will show u the char code, and u can use replace() or substring.

Answer 3

Thank you Johannes Rössel. It actually was '\uFEFF'

The following code works:

 final StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    for (final char character : body.toCharArray()) {
       if (character != '\uFEFF') {
          sb.append(character);
       }
     }  
 final String sanitzedString = sb.toString();

Anyone know of a way to just include a range of valid characters instead of excluding 95% of the UTF8 range?