How do I convert special characters using java?

Question

I have strings like:

Avery® Laser & Inkjet Self-Adhesive

I need to convert them to

Avery Laser & Inkjet Self-Adhesive.

I.e. remove special characters and convert html special chars to regular ones.

Answer 1

Avery® Laser & Inkjet Self-Adhesive

First use StringEscapeUtils#unescapeHtml4() (or #unescapeXml(), depending on the original format) to unescape the & into a &. Then use String#replaceAll() with [^\x20-\x7e] to get rid of characters which aren't inside the printable ASCII range.

Summarized:

String clean = StringEscapeUtils.unescapeHtml4(dirty).replaceAll("[^\\x20-\\x7e]", "");

..which produces

Avery Laser & Inkjet Self-Adhesive

(without the trailing dot as in your example, but that wasn't present in the original ;) )

That said, this however look like more a request to workaround than a request to solution. If you elaborate more about the functional requirement and/or where this string did originate, we may be able to provide the right solution. The ® namely look like to be caused by using the wrong encoding to read the string in and the & look like to be caused by using a textbased parser to read the string in instead of a fullfledged HTML parser.

Answer 2

You can use the StringEscapeUtils class from Apache Commons Text project.

Answer 3

Maybe you can use something like:

yourTxt = yourTxt.replaceAll("&", "&");

in some project I did something like:

public String replaceAcutesHTML(String str) {

str = str.replaceAll("á","á");
str = str.replaceAll("é","é");
str = str.replaceAll("í","í");
str = str.replaceAll("ó","ó");
str = str.replaceAll("ú","ú");
str = str.replaceAll("Á","Á");
str = str.replaceAll("É","É");
str = str.replaceAll("Í","Í");
str = str.replaceAll("Ó","Ó");
str = str.replaceAll("Ú","Ú");
str = str.replaceAll("ñ","ñ");
str = str.replaceAll("Ñ","Ñ");

return str;

}