Removing whitespace from strings in Java

Question

I have a string like this:

mysz = "name=john age=13 year=2001"; 

I want to remove the whitespaces in the string. I tried trim() but this removes only whitespaces before and after the whole string. I also tried replaceAll("\\W", "") but then the = also gets removed.

How can I achieve a string with:

mysz2 = "name=johnage=13year=2001" 

Answer 1

st.replaceAll("\\s+","") removes all whitespaces and non-visible characters (e.g., tab, \n).

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st.replaceAll("\\s+","") and st.replaceAll("\\s","") produce the same result.

The second regex is 20% faster than the first one, but as the number consecutive spaces increases, the first one performs better than the second one.

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Assign the value to a variable, if not used directly:

st = st.replaceAll("\\s+","") 

Answer 2

replaceAll("\\s","") 

\w = Anything that is a word character

\W = Anything that isn't a word character (including punctuation etc)

\s = Anything that is a space character (including space, tab characters etc)

\S = Anything that isn't a space character (including both letters and numbers, as well as punctuation etc)

(Edit: As pointed out, you need to escape the backslash if you want \s to reach the regex engine, resulting in \\s.)