Remove punctuation from a String in Java

This post will discuss how to remove punctuation from a String in Java.

The standard solution to remove punctuations from a String is using the replaceAll() method. It can remove each substring of the string that matches the given regular expression. You can use the POSIX character class \p{Punct} for creating a regular expression that finds punctuation characters.

public class Main

{

public static String removePunctuations(String source) {

return source.replaceAll("\\p{Punct}", "");

}

public static void main(String[] args) {

String source = "(A,B)#C:{A_B}[D]";

source = removePunctuations(source);

System.out.println(source); // ABCABD

}

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The \p{Punct} class matches with the predefined punctuation character class: p{IsPunctuation}

public class Main

{

public static String removePunctuations(String source) {

return source.replaceAll("\\p{IsPunctuation}", "");

}

public static void main(String[] args) {

String source = "(A,B)#C:{A_B}[D]";

source = removePunctuations(source);

System.out.println(source); // ABCABD

}

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If you need to remove all whitespaces along with the punctuation characters, you can use the following regex:

public class Main

{

public static String removePunctuations(String source) {

return source.replaceAll("\\p{Punct}|\\p{Space}", "");

}

public static void main(String[] args) {

String source = "(A,B)#C: {A_B}[D]";

source = removePunctuations(source);

System.out.println(source); // ABCABD

}

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The \p{Punct} class matches with the US-ASCII punctuation by default, i.e., any one of these characters: !"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~. You can specify any additional characters that you want to remove by adding them in this regex.

public class Main

{

public static String removePunctuations(String source) {

return source.replaceAll("[!\"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@\\[\\]^_`{|}~]", "");

}

public static void main(String[] args) {

String source = "(A,B)#C:::{A_B}[D]";

source = removePunctuations(source);

System.out.println(source); // ABCABD

}

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If the regex is called frequently, you might want to compile it to get performance benefits. This can be done by creating a Pattern object.

import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class Main

{

private static final Pattern PUNCT_SYMBOLS =

Pattern.compile("[!\"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@\\[\\]^_`{|}~]");

public static String removePunctuations(String source) {

return PUNCT_SYMBOLS.matcher(source).replaceAll("");

}

public static void main(String[] args) {

String source = "(A,B)#C:::{A_B}[D]";

source = removePunctuations(source);

System.out.println(source); // ABCABD

}

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That’s all about removing punctuation from a String in Java.

Remove punctuation from a String in Java

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