Java scriptlet to remove duplicate in string separated by | (delimiter)

Question

I have a String that looks like "(doc1| doc1| provid| geestt| stable)". It represents an array and I want to remove any duplicates from it so that doc1 appears only once. How can I do this?

Answer 1

    String s = "(doc1|doc1|provid|geestt|provid|stable)";
    s = s.replaceAll("\\b(\\w+)\\|(?=.*\\b\\1\\b)", "");
    System.out.println(s);
    // (doc1|geestt|provid|stable)

This uses \\w for word char; probably you need [^|)] that is: not one of the separator chars. The 0-char wide \\b is for detecting word boundaries, that fits.

This pattern uses a look-ahead (?= ... ) containing \\1 the 1^st matched () group: the word.

P.S. Set<String> seems to be a more appropiate data structure.