Regular expressions for replacing text with sms language text

Question

Hi, I'm trying to write a function which converts normal, correctly spelled text into the shorter sms language format but struggling to come up with the regular expressions i need to do so, can anyone help?
1: remove surplus white space at the beginning of a sentence and at the end of a sentence.
e.g. " hello." --> "hello." OR "hello ." --> "hello."
2: remove preceeding and/or proceeding space if there's a word then a number possibly followed by another word
e.g. "come 2 me" --> "come2me" OR "dnt 4get" --> "dnt4get"
3: remove "aeiou" if word starts and ends with "!aeiou"
e.g. "text" --> "txt"

Answer 1

You can make the whitespace on either side optional:   text = text.replaceAll("\\s*(\\d)\\s*", "$1");1. Use String's trim() method.
3. This one has to be done in two steps: import java.util.regex.*;
public class Test
  public static void main(String... args) throws Exception
    String text = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.";
    System.out.println(devowelize(text));
  public static String devowelize(String str)
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile(
      "[a-z&&[^aeiou]]++(?:[aeiou]++[a-z&&[^aeiou]]++)+",
      Pattern.CASE_INSENSITIVE);
    Matcher m = p.matcher(str);
    StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();
    while (m.find())
      m.appendReplacement(sb, m.group().replaceAll("[aeiou]+", ""));
    m.appendTail(sb);
    return sb.toString();
}