Question

I need to remove all white space only within quoted sections of a string.

Give this:
10 00,400,"a1 b2 c3 ",zz xx,100

I need this:
10 00,400,"a1b2c3",zz xx,100

Obviously, restricting it to quoted areas only is why I’m having trouble.

The strings will vary in length and can have multiple quoted sections.

Answer 1

Assuming that the quotes are balanced, then you could implement a method like this:

public static void main(String[] args) {

    String str = "10 00,400,\"a1 b2 c3 \",zz xx,100, \"a b\"";
    StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer();

    Matcher matcher = Pattern.compile("\"([^\"]+)\"").matcher(str);
    while (matcher.find()) {
        matcher.appendReplacement(sb, matcher.group().replaceAll("\\s+", ""));
    }

    System.out.println(sb.toString());
}

This prints:

10 00,400,"a1b2c3",zz xx,100, "ab"