regex - replace special characters in string in java

Question

I want to know how to replace the string in Java.

E.g.

String a = "adf?sdf";

How can I replace and avoid special characters?

Answer 1

You can get rid of all characters outside the printable ASCII range using String#replaceAll() by replacing the pattern [^\x20-\x7e] with an empty string:

a = a.replaceAll("[^\x20-\x7e]", "");

But this actually doesn't solve your actual problem. It's more a workaround. With the given information it's hard to nail down the root cause of this problem, but reading either of those articles must help a lot:

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
• Unicode - How to get the characters right?