How can I replace a string in parentheses using a regex?

Question

I have a string:

HLN (Formerly Headline News)

I want to remove everything inside the parens and the parens themselves, leaving only:

HLN

I've tried to do this with a regex, but my difficulty is with this pattern:

"(.+?)"

When I use it, it always gives me a PatternSyntaxException. How can I fix my regex?

Answer 1

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

For example:

"\\(.+?\\)"

Answer 2

String foo = "(x)()foo(x)()";
String cleanFoo = foo.replaceAll("\\([^\\(]*\\)", "");
// cleanFoo value will be "foo"

The above removes empty and non-empty parenthesis from either side of the string.

plain regex:

\([^\(]*\)

You can test here: http://www.regexplanet.com/simple/index.html

My code is based on previous answers

Answer 3

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 4

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

boz is now "bar "