what's a good regex for replacing ' followed by any character

[rotaryfreak]

Hi,

I've been trying to parse words like it's, can't, etc. so that all i'm left with is the root word i.e it for the word it's and can for the word can't.
This is what i have tried so far:

String regex = "('.*$)|('[a-z]+)|('(\\w)+)";

sadly, nothing is working... what am i doing wrong?

thx