Question

I am unable to strip one space before and after a hyphen. I have tried: –

sample.replaceAll("[\\s\\-\\s]","") 

and permutations to no avail. I dont want to strip all spaces, neither all the intervening spaces. I am trying to parse a string based on " " but want to eliminate "-". Any insight appreciated.

Answer 1

[\s\-\s] is a character class, and does not matches space followed by - followed by space. It matches any of the characters – space, and -, and replace them with empty string.

You can use this: –

sample = sample.replaceAll("[ ]-[ ]","-");

Or, even String.replace would work here. You don’t really need a replaceAll: –

sample = sample.replace(" - ", "-");