Trim leading or trailing characters from a string?

You could use

Leading:

System.out.println("//test/me".replaceAll("^/+", ""));

Trailing:

System.out.println("//test/me//".replaceAll("/+$", ""));

You can use Apache StringUtils.stripStart to trim leading characters, or StringUtils.stripEnd to trim trailing characters.

For example:

System.out.println(StringUtils.stripStart("//test/me", "/"));

will output:

test/me

Note that if for some reason you can't use the whole StringUtils library, you could just rip out the relevant parts, as detailed here: