Remove white space before punctuation in Java

Question

I have a string

"This is a big sentence .  !  ?  !  but I have to remove the space ."   

In this sentence I want to remove all the space coming before the punctuation and should become

"This is a big sentence.!?!  but I have to remove the space."   

I am trying to use "\p{Punct}" but not able to replace in string.

Answer 1

You should use positive lookahead:

newStr = str.replaceAll("\\s+(?=\\p{Punct})", "")

ideone.com demo for your particular string

Break down of the expression:

• \s: White space...
• (?=\\p{Punct}) ... which is followed by punctuation.