Removing whitespaces and weird characters

Question

Hi,
I need a way to remove the whitespaces and punctuation marks from a String.
So for example,
"This is a cool racecar!, right?"
should be read as
"thisisacoolracecarright"
After googling for a while, I think I can use a split() method or a BufferedReader, but I don't know how to proceed. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
This is part of my homework, so I really don't want you to solve it for me, but just help me look in the API or type in a sample code.
Help would be greatly appreciated.
-Rommel.
PS: 10 duke starts to be awarded.
Edited by: RommelTJ on Sep 15, 2008 9:52 PM

Answer 1

Sorry for the super late reply, but I couldn't forget to come back and award the Duke Stars.
Ravi_Gupta wrote:
while (!inputWord.isEmpty())Always true because you are not modifying the inputWork.
Try something like this:
for(int i=0;i<inputWord.length(); i++)
ch = inputWord.charAt(i);
if (ch>='A' && ch<='Z' || ch>='a' && ch<='z'){
} //end if statement.
} //end while statement.
This is what I ended up doing:               System.out.println("Please type a word, sentence, or phrase to be checked:");
              inputWord = StdIn.readLine();                               //records the word inputted(?) by the user.
              inputWord = inputWord.toLowerCase();                     //converts the 'inputWord' to all Lower Case
              for(int i=0;i<inputWord.length(); i++) {                //removes punctuation marks
                   char ch = inputWord.charAt(i);          
                   if (ch>='A' && ch<='Z' || ch>='a' && ch<='z'){      //checks if character is in the alphabet
                       shortWord += ch;                                //and if it is, it concatenates it to 'shortWord'
                   }                                                             //end if statement.
               }                                                                  //end for statement.
              System.out.println(); I'll give 8 Stars to Ravi_Gupta and 2 Stars to Flounder.