Preserving the Decimal Separator while Removing Non-Numeric Characters in a Java String

When working with Java strings, situations arise where you may need to remove all non-numeric characters while retaining the decimal separator. This can be achieved effectively using regular expressions and the replaceAll() method.

To address this issue, we can employ the following code snippet:

String str = "a12.334tyz.78x";
str = str.replaceAll("[^\\d.]", "");

This code uses the replaceAll() method to search for all characters that do not match the pattern [^\\d.]. This pattern specifies that we want to retain all digits (\\d) and the decimal separator (.).

As a result, after applying this operation, the string str will contain "12.334.78," preserving the decimal separator while removing all non-numeric characters.