How can I avoid repeating the replacement character when replacing substrings

Question

I have the following string in a database

**final test project - test decorations**

and I want to replace spaces with dashes ( the - character ). This is what I have so far:

tit1 = rs.getString("title");
tit1 = tit1.replaceAll("\\s{1}", "-");

The outputs looks like this

**final-test-project---test-decorations**
  **shadow-of-the-test----test**

but i want output like this

**final-test-project-test-decorations**
   **shadow-of-the-test-test**

How can I make the replacement ignore the single dash surrounded with whitespaces?

Answer 1

You may use the following line

tit1 = tit1.replaceAll("[\\s-]+", "-");

instead of your call to replaceAll . It takes all consecutive spaces together with dashes and replaces them by a single dash.