How to remove all lines that start with a certain string using java regex?

Question

There is a text of about 1000 characters.

String text = "bla bla..................
               .........................
               .........................
               file.....................
               .........................
               .........................
               file.....................
               .........................

Some lines start with a word "file". How can I remove ALL such lines? Here is what I tried

text = text.replaceAll("file.*?//n", ""); 

Answer 1

You could try the following instead:

text = text.replaceAll("(?m)^file.*", "");

• (?m): Turns multi-line mode on, so that the start-of-line ^ anchor matches the start of each line.
• ^: matches the start-of-line.
• file: Matches the literal file sequence.
• .* matches everything to the end of line.

So this look for any line that has the word file at the start, then matches the entire line and replaces it with the empty string.