question: public static String replaceTildesAndStars ( String origText_ ) { String cleanText = origText_ . replaceAll ( "~" , "" ) ; cleanText = cleanText . replaceAll ( "\\*" , "" ) ; cleanText = cleanText . replaceAll ( "\\^" , "" ) ; return cleanText ; }
target:  web documents sometimes use tildes and stars either for page section breaks or as bullets for bullet points; these may cause problems to NLP components <p> this method strips these characters completely