Parsing a currency String in java

Question

Suppose I'm supplied with a String which is like "$123,456,56.25" or "123'456.67" or something similar to this (with digits and a decimal point and some seperator like , or ' or something else which is not predictable). I need to write a method which takes an argument like the one above and returns a String like "12345656.25" or "123456.67" respectively.

Could you please suggest the most efficient and readable code to achieve this?

Note: I'm aware of going through each indexes and checking for whether its retunrs true for Character.isDigit(charAtInedx) or if(charAtInedx == '.') I'm looking for a more optimized solution both in terms of efficiency and readability

Thanks.

Answer 1

String newStr = oldStr.replaceAll("[^\\d.]+", "")

This will drop any character that is not either a digit or a period

Answer 2

If you want to handle monetary values correctly, you will want to have a look at the NumberFormat class, specifically for your case NumberFormat.parse(String). The following article also discusses the problems (and solutions) to handling money in Java:

http://www.javapractices.com/topic/TopicAction.do?Id=13

Other related classes include: Currency and of course BigDecimal.