Incomprehensible error (regex)

Question

Hi all,
There I was, happily tap-tapping away in Java, sipping on my Diet Coke and wondering if tonights episode of The Simpsons would be one I'd seen or not, when blam!.....Up pops this error, which means nothing to me (since I've not really covered regular expressions yet).
java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException: Dangling meta character '+' near index 0
+
^
at java.util.regex.Pattern.error(Pattern.java:1528)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.sequence(Pattern.java:1645)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.expr(Pattern.java:1545)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Pattern.java:1279)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.<init>(Pattern.java:1035)
at java.util.regex.Pattern.compile(Pattern.java:779)
at java.lang.String.replaceAll(String.java:1663)
at Utility.stripOut(Utility.java:47)
at TryUtility.main(TryUtility.java:14)
Exception in thread "main"
The code in question is this: -
        String sString = "+02:00";
        sString = Utility.stripOut(sString, "+");
        System.out.println(sString);...using this static method....
    // Strips out all occurances of sWhat from string sFrom.
    public static String stripOut(String sFrom, String sWhat) {
        if ((sFrom == null) || (sFrom.length() < 1) || (sWhat.length() < 1)) {
            return null;
        } else {
            return sFrom.replaceAll(sWhat, "");
    }All it should do is strip out a chosen character or string from another string and return the modifed result. Shouldn't be too hard :)
BTW, line 47 from the stacktrace is the method return line of the stripOut() method and line 14 is the calling line from the execution code.
I don't really see what the problem is with stripping out the '+' sign from the String, but as I said, I've not really done much with reg expressions yet, so any advice / info would be useful.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Thanks very much guys.....I didn't realise that using replaceAll actually fell within the realms of regular expressions. :)