Regular expression for exactly OR contains

Question

I want to send a location to Google Geocoding API, therefore I want to replace any space or comma in the text (as it can be received) with +.

For example, all those samples should return Glentworth+Ireland :

Glentworth Ireland

Glentworth,Ireland

Glentworth, Ireland

I tried with: place.replaceAll("/\\\\\\\\b ,/\\\\\\\\b|[ ,]", "+") . But I still got in the latest case Glentworth++Ireland (where it's should be one plus only).

So the question is how can I replace " ," with plus (and just if <space>, not exist exact to replace the space/comma with plus) ?

(Or in other words, how can I be sure the place is ready to send as request to the API).

PS Of course, I can do it with to replaces, but not want!

Answer 1

Simply you can do it with two replaces: at first you replace any "," to " ", and next you replace all spaces to one plus. If you want to do it with one replace, you can use "[\\,\\s]\\s*"

Answer 2

If you want to replace any sequence of commas and spaces in your string with a single plus sign, you can do this:

place.replaceAll("[, ]+", "+")

[, ] is a character class containing comma and space, that means it will match either a comma or a space.

+ means "the preceding item one or more times".

So [, ]+ means "one or more occurrences of commas and/or spaces".