Remove dash from a phone number

zoom_pat277 picture zoom_pat277 · Apr 27, 2010 · Viewed 51.8k times · Source

What regular expression using java could be used to filter out dashes '-' and open close round brackets from a string representing phone numbers...

so that (234) 887-9999 should give 2348879999 and similarly 234-887-9999 should give 2348879999.

Thanks,

Answer

Vivin Paliath picture Vivin Paliath · Apr 27, 2010
phoneNumber.replaceAll("[\\s\\-()]", "");

The regular expression defines a character class consisting of any whitespace character (\s, which is escaped as \\s because we're passing in a String), a dash (escaped because a dash means something special in the context of character classes), and parentheses.

See String.replaceAll(String, String).

EDIT

Per gunslinger47:

phoneNumber.replaceAll("\\D", "");

Replaces any non-digit with an empty string.