replaceall REGEX in java

Question

Completely new to java and I have been playing around with regex in a replaceAll command and wondered if the way that I have done it is the best way? I basically wanted to find every occurence of <Letter_File TIMESTAMP="0000-00-00 00:00" FILECREATOR="XXX" BRAND_ID="0" BRAND_NAME="xxxxxxxxx"> within my file and replace it with <Letter_File> i am using the following:

str1 = str1.replaceAll("\\<Letter\\_File[a-zA-Z\\_\\s\\=\\\"0-9-\\:\\\"]+\\>","<Letter_File>");>

what I wanted to know, is this the best way of doing the function or is there a way that the REGEX can be shortened?

Any feedback is more then welcome.

Thanks

• Karthikeyan Arumugam: so basically you are trying to replace the tag <Letter_File TIMESTAMP="0000-00-00 00:00" FILECREATOR="XXX" BRAND_ID="0" BRAND_NAME="xxxxxxxxx"> with <Letter_File> tag in your XML file right ?
• Simon.Knott86: yes correct I basically want to strip all of the attributes out of the <Letter_File> tag, I know that this is probably a very noobish way of doing so!

Answer 1

How about:

str1 = str1.replaceAll("<Letter_File[^>]+>","<Letter_File>");>

• Simon.Knott86: Thanks this works fine, just out of curiousity could you explain how this works? am I right in assuming that the [^>] will look for anything after the <Letter_File upto the >? I thought that you had to put in the certain characters it looked for hence why I put all of those different variations e.g. a-zA-Z0-9 etc. etc.
• Toto: @Simon.Knott86: [^>] means any character that is not >. Have a look at this site: regular-expressions.info/charclass.html
• Simon.Knott86: thanks very much I think that helps alot, I wasnt sure as the ^ character to my understanding can also mean "at the start of"
• Toto: @Simon.Knott86: Yes the ^ means start of string except when inside a character class it negates the class.