Remove digits but not when part of a word

Question

I want to remove non-alphabet characters from an address, except when they followed by letters.

e.g. I want to remove 7 and e7 but not 7th

I think the english translation of the regex exp would be: remove all "words" that don't end with an alphabetic character?

I want to turn

850 7th Ave Frnt 1, New York, NY 10019

Into

7th Ave Frnt, New York, NY

Previously I was doing

address.replaceAll("\\d","");

But when I came up with words like 7th the 7 was disappearing, I want to keep these words entirely.

I've tried this (\d)$ but this seems to only match the final digit of 10019 (also tried many other variations) all seem far off the mark.

Answer 1

Use word boundaries.

address.replaceAll("\\b\\d+\\b","");

or

Add \s*, if you want to remove also the spaces which exists before the number.

address.replaceAll("\\s*\\b\\d+\\b\\s*","");

Answer 2

\\b\\d+\\b

Try this.See demo.

https://regex101.com/r/gT6vU5/7

\b assert position at a word boundary (^\w|\w$|\W\w|\w\W)

or using lookaheads.

(?:^|(?<=\W))\d+(?=\W|$)

https://regex101.com/r/gT6vU5/8