Remove special characters in the string in java?

Question

How to remove special characters in the string except "- _". Now I use:

replaceAll("[^\\w\\s]", "")

it remove all special character but i want to keep "- _" . Can anyone tell me how should I do?

Answer 1

Use replaceAll("[^\\w\\s\\-_]", "");

What I did was add the underscore and hyphen to the regular expression. I added a \\ before the hyphen because it also serves for specifying ranges: a-z means all letters between a and z. Escaping it with \\ makes sure it is treated as an hyphen.

Answer 2

This might help:

replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z0-9_-]", "");