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