IndexOf in for loop only removes one character

I want to use IndexOf inside a for loop so I can remove all instances of a word/character in a phrase, but my code only deletes the first instance even if I think it should remove the others. Here is my code:

    String phrase = "yes no YES NO";
    String del = "no";
    for (int i=0;i<phrase.length();i++) {
        if (phrase.indexOf(del) == i) {
            System.out.print("");
        }
        else 
            System.out.print(phrase.charAt(i));
    }

The code above gives me this result:

yes o YES NO

I want my code to give me

yes YES

but I don’t understand why indexOf only removes one character and I don’t understand how I can use .equalsIgnoreCase with my string to also remove “NO”. How should I change my code to get this answer?

Answer

indexOf is used in order to find a specific character in a String. If you’d like to remove a specific value within a String, I suggest using the replaceAll method.

Also, note that both indexOf and replaceAll are case-sensitive. That means that “no” and “NO” are different, since “NO” is upper-cased (that’s also the reason the “NO” is left untouched).

Use target.replaceAll("(?i)" + Pattern.quote("text"), ""); for a case-insensitive variant (as explained in this post).