Remove everything in parentheses java using regex

Question

I've used the following regex to try to remove parentheses and everything within them in a string called name.

name.replaceAll("\\(.*\\)", "");

For some reason, this is leaving name unchanged. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Strings are immutable. You have to do this:

name = name.replaceAll("\\(.*\\)", "");

Edit: Also, since the .* is greedy, it will kill as much as it can. So "(abc)something(def)" will be turned into "".

Answer 2

As mentionend by by Jelvis, ".*" selects everything and converts "(ab) ok (cd)" to ""

The version below works in these cases "(ab) ok (cd)" -> "ok", by selecting everything except the closing parenthesis and removing the whitespaces.

test = test.replaceAll("\\s*\\([^\\)]*\\)\\s*", " ");

Answer 3

String.replaceAll() doesn't edit the original string, but returns the new one. So you need to do:

name = name.replaceAll("\\(.*\\)", "");