Remove all or certain special Character from beginning of the String

Question

I am running through a scenario where i have to create table through jdbc statement and i am receiving the table name as method argument. Oracle database is used and Oracle has naming rule like table name should not start with any of these following character $#_. I want to replace all those special character only from the beginning but not from in_between or at the end. For example:

#_PHYSICIANS → PHYSICIANS

##_#_PHYSICIANS → PHYSICIANS

##_#_PHYSICIANS_#_NAME → PHYSICIANS_#_NAME

What Regular expression shall I use to replace these characters from the beginning?

What have you tried so far ? Where are you facing an issue ? We're not here to do your job, There are a lot of site where you can test and design your regex. Comeback and Ask when you have a precise problem, or something you don't understand. not when you want someoine else to do your job — vincrichaud, Dec 19 '18 at 13:05
@vincrichaud sadly these posts will never stop while people are still doing there job for them anyway. I wish people would not answer these types of questions. — Martyn, Dec 19 '18 at 14:05

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 19 '18 at 13:03

Whatever characters you want to strip from the beginning, you can put them in the character set and use this regex,

^[#_]+

and replace it with empty string.

Here ^ marks the start of string and [#_]+ means one or more characters from character set.

Java code,

List<String> list = Arrays.asList("#_PHYSICIANS","##_#_PHYSICIANS","##_#PHYSICIANS_#_NAME");
list.forEach(x -> System.out.println(x + " --> " + x.replaceAll("^[#_]+", "")));

Prints,

#_PHYSICIANS --> PHYSICIANS
##_#_PHYSICIANS --> PHYSICIANS
##_#PHYSICIANS_#_NAME --> PHYSICIANS_#_NAME

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 19 '18 at 13:02

2

Try this one.If its working for you

^($|#|_)*

https://regex101.com/r/wg9TEe/1

answered Dec 19 '18 at 13:02

Prashant Deshmukh.....

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 19 '18 at 13:04

1

s = s.replaceFirst("^[#_$]+", "");

^ means from the beginning, [...] lists the chars, ...+ one or more.

answered Dec 19 '18 at 13:04

Joop Eggen

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score 1 · Answer 4 · answered Dec 19 '18 at 13:07

This removes the part before any character.

 String text = "#_PHYSICIANS_#";
 Pattern p = Pattern.compile("\\p{L}");
 Matcher m = p.matcher(text);
 if (m.find()) {
   System.out.println(m.start());
   String result = text.substring(m.start(), text.length());
   System.out.println(result);
 }

Remove all or certain special Character from beginning of the String

4 Answers4