Regex for certain words causes Spaces

Question

For instance i'm trying to search this string

"this is a search LLC which can end up having spaces"

using the below regex, it's working fine but when I match and then remove it's causes a bunch of white spaces, so I want to limit the number the white space to just 1, how could I go about adding that?

(?i)(?<=|^)LLC|end|having(?=|$)

this is a search LLC which can end up having spaces

this is a search which can up spaces

public static String removeValuesByRegex(String input, Pattern pattern, String replaceWith){
    String result;

    Matcher matcher = pattern.matcher(input);

    return result = matcher.replaceAll(replaceWith).trim();
}

Then in my test class im doing

String keywords = 'LLC|end|Having';
Pattern pattern = Pattern.compile('(?i)(?<= |^)\'|' + keyWords + '\'|(?= |$)');

String stringResult = UtilString.removeValuesByRegex('This is a LLC and General Partnership Test ', pattern, '');

Answer 1

If you want to remove duplicate spacing, I recommend you call normalizeSpace on the output:

String result = MyClass.myMethod(input, pattern, '').normalizeSpace();

Note from the documentation:

normalizeSpace()
Returns the current String with leading, trailing, and repeating white space characters removed.