How to remove first and last special character of string in groovy language

Question

String s ="[ABC_JJBB_DD]";

I'm getting string value from application data, how could I remove special character [ and ] in the string in groovy. Using

s.removeAll('[','']

timyates_6509 · Answer

You can do it the java route, as Aniket says:

s.substring(1, s.length()-1)

Or you can take the Groovy route of:

s[1..-2]

But you'd need to ensure s is longer than 1 char, with both of these, or else you'll get a StringIndexOutOfBoundsException

If you don't want to check, you can do esoteric things like

s.drop(1).reverse().drop(1).reverse()

Which will work, but will be slower

Or, if you just want to remove all [ and ], you could do

s.replaceAll(~/[]/, '')

user_3181392 · Answer

Since Groovy 3 you can use takeBetween, that has beside other arguments one for start and end string. E.g.

groovy:000> "[ABC_JJBB_DD]".takeBetween("[","]")
===> ABC_JJBB_DD