How to remove some parts of a string?

Question

I have to remove some parts of a string like this:

customers/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000111/areas/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000222/orders/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000555/invoices/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000777/employees/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000213.gz

To get the path without the uuids but with the file extension. It should look like

customers/areas/orders/invoices/employees/.gz

How can I do this? With Matcher or substring? Which is best option? Is there any custom regex that I can use to remove UUIDs from the string?

How do you get those paths? Are they always the same? What have you tried so far that didn't work? — daniu, Jan 28 '19 at 08:19
some good UUID regex https://stackoverflow.com/questions/136505 — Dang Nguyen, Jan 28 '19 at 08:22

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 28 '19 at 08:24

1

You can replace the string using the following Regex:

(\{){0,1}[0-9a-fA-F]{8}\-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}\-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}\-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}\-[0-9a-fA-F]{12}(\}){0,1}

answered Jan 28 '19 at 08:24

Tig7r

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Davide Lorenzo MARINO · Accepted Answer · 2019-01-28T08:31:18.683

1

Assuming that UUID in your case are only numbers with minus You can use a regular expression like the following

[0-9][-0-9]*[0-9][\/]?

to replace strings like

00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000111/
00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000222/
00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000555/
00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000213
...

with an empty string as in the following code:

String path = ...;
// Note the additional \ in the following string, 
// this is necessary because we are using a string to represent the regexp
System.out.println(path.replaceAll("[0-9][-0-9]*[0-9][\\/]?", ""));

that prints

customers/areas/orders/invoices/employees/.gz

edited Jan 28 '19 at 08:31

answered Jan 28 '19 at 08:25

Davide Lorenzo MARINO

22,769
4
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Nice solution, thanx – Adam Jungen Jan 28 '19 at 08:32
@AdamJungen if your uuid are in hexadecimal format you have to replace each 0-9 with 0-9A-Fa-f – Davide Lorenzo MARINO Jan 28 '19 at 08:33
No it is not, thanx – Adam Jungen Jan 28 '19 at 08:36

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 28 '19 at 08:33

You could give a try FilenameUtils.getExtension from Apache Commons IO

(you may specify either full path or just file name):

String ext1 = FilenameUtils.getExtension("customers/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000111/areas/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000222/orders/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000555/invoices/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000777/employees/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000213.gz"); // returns "gz"
String ext2 = FilenameUtils.getExtension("002345620000000213.txt"); // returns "txt"

How to remove some parts of a string?

3 Answers3