Question

I know that removing whitespaces is as easy as String.trim(). But my string contains tab (\t) characters which I would like to keep.

Example:

"teststring\t\t\t     ".trimSpaceNotTab() => "teststring\t\t\t"

My current implementation is to use split();

String[] arr = tabbedString.split("\t");

Then joining them somewhere as a string.

I find this implementation slow and ugly.

Is there a better way in Java where I can retain the tabs?

Answer 1

How about

tabbedString.replaceAll("[ \n\x0B\f\r]","")

Function used – String.replaceAll()

In case you’d like to also go for tabs and remove them, use a predefined character class \s

Pattern Summary