removePunctuation method

String removePunctuation()

Removes punctuation characters from a string, while preserving alphabetic characters (including accented characters and characters from other languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), numbers, and whitespace.

The method uses a Unicode-aware regular expression (punctuationRegex) to identify and remove any character that is not a letter (as defined by Unicode Letter property \p{L}), whitespace (\s), or a number (\p{N}). This ensures that accented characters, characters from non-Latin alphabets, numbers, and various whitespace characters are correctly preserved, while common punctuation marks and symbols are removed.

Note: Symbols that are not categorized as punctuation by the regex and are not letters, numbers, or whitespace will be removed. Emojis and certain special symbols might be removed as they are not classified as Unicode Letters, Numbers, or whitespace.

Returns: A new string with punctuation removed, while preserving letters, numbers, and whitespace.

Example:

String text = "Hello, world!  你好世界！(This is a test).";
String cleanedText = text.removePunctuation();
print(cleanedText); // Output: Hello world 你好世界 This is a test

String accentedText = "café, résumé.";
String cleanedAccentedText = accentedText.removePunctuation();
print(cleanedAccentedText); // Output: café résumé

String mixedText = "Text with 123 punctuation marks!";
String cleanedMixedText = mixedText.removePunctuation();
print(cleanedMixedText); // Output: Text with 123 punctuation marks

Implementation

String removePunctuation() => replaceAll(punctuationRegex, '');