Remove all the dots but not \in numbers - Java

I am trying to replace all the . in a string except numbers like 1.02

I have a string : -

String rM = "51.3L of water is provided. 23.3L is used."

If I use rM.replaceAll() then every dot will be replaced, I want my string to be : -

51.3L of water is provided 23.3L is used

Is it possible to do in java?

I am not a java developer but can you try it with a pattern like below.

rM = rM.replaceAll("(?<=[a-z\\s])\\.", "");

yes its possible. Something like the following should work. The regex should just check that the element starts with a character 0-9. If yes, don't change the element. If no, replace any . with the empty string.

        String rM = "51.3L of water is provided. 23.3L is used.";
        String[] tokens = rM.split(" ");

        StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
        for (String element : tokens) {
            if (element.matches("[0-9]+.*")) {
                buffer.append(element + " ");
            } else {
                buffer.append(element.replace(".", "") + " ");
            }
        }
        System.out.println(buffer.toString());

Output:

51.3L of water is provided 23.3L is used 

Here's a simple approach that assumes you want to get rid of dots that are placed directly after a char which isn't a whitespace.

The following code basically splits the sentence by whitespace(s) and removes trailing dots in every resulting character sequence and joins them afterwards to a single String again.

public static void main(String[] args) {
	// example sentence
	String rM = "51.3L of water is provided. 23.3L is used.";
	// split the sentence by whitespace(s)
	String[] parts = rM.split("\\s+");
	
	// go through all the parts
	for (int i = 0; i < parts.length; i++) {
		// check if one of the parts ends with a dot
		if (parts[i].endsWith(".")) {
			// if it does, replace that part by itself minus the trailing dot
			parts[i] = parts[i].substring(0, parts[i].length() - 1);
		}
	}
	
	// join the parts to a sentence String again
	String removedUndesiredDots = String.join(" ", parts);
	// and print that
	System.out.println(removedUndesiredDots);
}

The output is

51.3L of water is provided 23.3L is used

replaceAll() with the right regex can do it for you.

This uses a negative look-ahead and look-behind to look for a '.' not in the middle of a decimal number.

rM.replaceAll("(?<![\\d])\\.(?![\\d]+)", "")

Using negative lookahead you can use \.(?![\d](\.[\d])?).

private static final String DOTS_NO_NUM_REGEX = "\\.(?![\\d](\\.[\\d])?)";
private static final Pattern PATTERN = Pattern.compile(DOTS_NO_NUM_REGEX);

public static void main(String[] args)
{
    String s = "51.3L of water is provided. 23.3L is used.";

    String replaced = PATTERN.matcher(s).replaceAll("");
    System.out.println(replaced);
}

Output:

51.3L of water is provided 23.3L is used