Hi All.
I would like to trim a beginning and ending double quote (") from a string. how can I achieve that in java? thanks!
But watch out for quotes in the middle...
David Gelhar
2010-04-09 15:36:52
so it should be first index and the last index of double qoute.
GK
2010-04-09 15:39:03
+5
A:
You can use String#replaceAll() with a pattern of ^\"|\"$ for this.
E.g.
string = string.replaceAll("^\"|\"$", "");
To learn more about regular expressions, have al ook at http://regular-expression.info.
That said, this smells a bit like that you're trying to invent a CSV parser. If so, I'd suggest to look around for existing libraries, such as OpenCSV.
BalusC
2010-04-09 15:29:48
don't you think it will replaces all occurrences of double quotes with empty string rather then the first and the last.
GK
2010-04-09 15:36:10
I'm not building a csv parser. i'm building a facebook app using tinyfbclient and for some reason it provides me the uid of the user with trailing and ending double quotes.
ufk
2010-04-09 15:36:10
@ufk: This isn't a complex regex. You may otherwise want to hassle with a bunch of `String#indexOf()`, `String#substring()`, methods and so on. It's only a little tad faster, but it's much more code. @GK: Uh, did you read/understand the regex or even test it?
BalusC
2010-04-09 15:37:27
i checked. it does not replace all occurrences of double quotes. only the first and the last.
ufk
2010-04-09 15:39:47
sorry BalusC i am not good at Regex, as you have used replaceAll, i had a doubt on that.
GK
2010-04-09 15:40:55
@GK the caret represents the beginning of the searched string, and the dollar sign represents its end. The backslash here "escapes" the following quote so it's treated as just a character. So this regex says, replace all occurrences of quote at the start, or quote at the end, with the empty string. Just as requested.
Carl Manaster
2010-04-09 15:53:40
@GK: Carl's right. Also, `replace()` methods doesn't accept regex. They accept only a char or a literal string (charsequence). The `replaceAll()` method is the only accepting a regex to match character patterns for replacement.
BalusC
2010-04-09 16:28:52
+2
A:
To remove the first character and last character from the string, use:
myString = myString.substring(1, myString.length()-1);
Michael Myers
2010-04-09 15:31:29
This only requires that the quotes should *guaranteed* be present. If there's no guarantee, then you'll need to check it first beforehand.
BalusC
2010-04-09 15:32:58
@BalusC: Certainly. From my reading of the question, it seems that the string is already known to have quotes around it.
Michael Myers
2010-04-09 15:36:18