Java remove escaped double-quote

Question

I have a long Java String that contains lots of escaped double-quotes:

// Prints: \"Hello my name is Sam.\" \"And I am a good boy.\"
System.out.println(bigString);

I want to remove all the escaped double-quotes (\") and replace them with normal double-quotes (") so that I get:

// Prints: "Hello my name is Sam." "And I am a good boy."
System.out.println(bigString);

I thought this was a no-brainer. My best attempt of:

bigString = bigString.replaceAll("\\", "");

Throws the following exception:

Unexpected internal error near index 1

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Everybody is telling you to use replaceAll, the better answer is really to use replace.

replaceAll - requires regular expression

replace [javadoc]- is just a string search and replace

So like this:

bigString = bigString.replace("\\\"", "\"");

Note that this is also faster because regular expression is not needed.

Answer 2

Replace all uses Regular expressions, so add another set of \\

bigString = bigString.replaceAll("\\\\\"", "\"");

Explanation why: "\" is interpretad by java as a normal \. However if you would use only that in the parameter, it becomes the regular expression \. A \ in a regular expression escapes the next character. Since none is found, it throws an exception.

When you write in Java "\\\\\"", it is first treated by java as the regular expression \\". Which is then treated by the regular expression implementation as "a backslash followed by a double-quote".

Answer 3

  String str="\"Hello my name is Sam.\" \"And I am a good boy.\"";
  System.out.println(str.replaceAll("\\\"", "\""));

Output:

 "Hello my name is Sam." "And I am a good boy."