How to find non-alphabets using Java

Question

I am processing text corpus. It contains several characters belonging to different languages, symbols, numbers, etc.

-> All I need to do is to skip the symbols like arrow mark, heart symbol, etc.

-> I should not be spoiling any characters of different languages.

Any leads?

----UPDATE----

Character.isLetter('\unicode') is working for most of them, if not some. I have checked my regional languages, it seems it's working for some but not each and every.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If i understnad correctly, the characters you want to remove are of a rather limited set. Why not just check for these? Unicode has a whole bunch of non-letter characters, but in your case, the non-letter characters encountered will probably be a small subset of what exists.

Sounds like a job for regular expressions, if you ask me. Remove everything that's not a word character, digit or whitespace, and you've probably got it. Or create an array containing all characters you want filtered out (which in that case should be few and known).