Replace all "(" and ")" in a string in Java

Question

How to replace all "(" and ")" in a string with a fullstop, in Java? I tried in the following way:

String url = "https://bitbucket.org/neeraj_r/url-shortner)";
url.replaceAll(")", ".");
url.replaceAll(")", ".");

But it does not work. The error is:

Exception in thread "main" java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Unmatched closing
')'
 )
at java.util.regex.Pattern.error(Unknown Source)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Unknown Source)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.<init>(Unknown Source)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.String.replaceAll(Unknown Source)
at com.azzist.cvConversion.server.URLChecker.main(URLChecker.java:32)

I think this problem will be there in all regex too. Adding \ before ) did not work.

Solution 1

You can use replaceAll in one go:

url.replaceAll("[()]", ".")

Explanation:

• [()] matches both ( and ), the brackets don't need to be escaped inside the [] group.

EDIT (as pointed out by @Keppil):

Note also, the String url is not changed by the replace, it merely returns a new String with the replacements, so you'd have to do:

url = url.replaceAll("[()]", ".");

Solution 2

You need to escape '(' and ')' with "\\(" and "\\)" respectively:

url = url.replaceAll("\\)", ".");  
url = url.replaceAll("\\(", ".")

Solution 3

replaceAll() expects a regex as first parameter, and parantheses have special meaning there.

use replace() instead:

String url = "https://bitbucket.org/neeraj_r/url-shortner)";
url = url.replace("(", ".").replace(")", ".");

Note that the url = part is important to save the result of the replacement. Since Strings are immutable, the original String isn't changed, but a new one is created. To keep the result url needs to point to this one instead.

Solution 4

1. String is immutable.
2. ) should be escaped with 2 backslashes.

So the code would look like this:

String url = "https://bitbucket.org/neeraj_r/url-shortner)";
// is you need to escape all of them, use "[()]" pattern, instead of "\\)"
String s = url.replaceAll("\\)", "."); 
System.out.println(url);
System.out.println(s);

And the output:

https://bitbucket.org/neeraj_r/url-shortner)
https://bitbucket.org/neeraj_r/url-shortner.

Solution 5

Adding a single \ will not work, because that will try to evaluate \) as an escaped special character which it isn't.

You'll need to use "\)". The first \ escapes the second, producing a "normal" \, which in turn escapes the ), producing a regex matching exactly a closing paranthesis ).

The general purpose solution is to use Pattern.quote, which takes an arbitrary string and returns a regex that matches exactly that string.

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