replace string in parentheses using regex

Question

I have gone through all related topics here on regex and can't find one that really works for my case.

What I want to do is:

HLN (Formerly Headline News) => HLN

which means: I would replace everything inside the parentheses to be "" (including the parentheses).

My difficulty is how to find the pattern "(.+?)", when I tried it, it always gives me

PatternSyntaxException at (

Look forward to your kind help.

Answer 1

Because parentheses are special characters in regexps you need to escape them to match them explicitly.

For example:

"\\(.+?\\)"

Answer 2

You could use the following regular expression to find parentheticals:

\([^)]*\)

the \( matches on a left parenthesis, the [^)]* matches any number of characters other than the right parenthesis, and the \) matches on a right parenthesis.

If you're including this in a java string, you must escape the \ characters like the following:

String regex = "\\([^)]*\\)";

Answer 3

String foo = "bar (baz)";
String boz = foo.replaceAll("\\(.+\\)", ""); // or replaceFirst

boz is now "bar "

Answer 4

Hello,

What about inner parenthesis?

Suppose that in the string "something: (bla (aa(b)cc) bla)" I want to get the content of the first parenthesis "bla (aa(b)cc) bla", what include other parenthesis?

Is there an easy way ?

Thanks