Regular expression removes the space character and dash

Question

For a string of type String a="- = - - What is your name?";

How to remove leading equal, dash, space characters to get clear text,

"What's your name?"

Answer 1

If you want to remove leading non-alphabets that you can match:

 ^[^a-zA-Z]+ 

and replace it with '' (empty string).

Explanation:

• first ^ - Anchor to match the beginning.
• [] - char class
• second ^ - negation in class char
• + - one or more previous matches

So, a regular expression matches one or more of any non-alphabets that are at the beginning of a line.

In your case, it will get rid of all leading spaces leading with a hyphen and the leading sign is equal. In short, to the first alphabet.

Answer 2

  $a=~s/- = - - //; 

Answer 3

In javascript you can do it like this

 var a = "- = - - What is your name?"; a = a.replace(/^([-=\s]*)([a-zA-Z0-9])/gm,"$2"); 

Answer 4

Java:

 String replaced = a.replaceFirst("^[-= ]*", ""); 

Answer 5

Assuming Java uses this regex:

  /^\W*(.*)$/ 

extracts your row from captured group 1!

\W* matches all preceding characters without words (.*) Then matches all characters at the end starting with the character of the first word

^, $ - borders. you could even do without $ in this case.

Tip try a great Java tutorial for reference.

Answer 6

In Python:

 >>> "- = - - What is your name?".lstrip("-= ") 'What is your name?' 

To remove any spaces, use .lstrip("-= \t\r\n") .