How to use replaceall to remove all blank space with hypens in apex

Question

I am trying to replace a spaces within a string with hypen.

For example

'this is a sample'

should be

'this-is-a-sample'

.replace('/\s+/g', '-') gives an error

Invalid string literal '/\s+/g'. Illegal character sequence '\s' in string literal.

Answer 1

\ is always an escape character.

• To use the regex \s, you need to use \\s.
• To use a literal \, use \\\\.

Answer 2

why don't you use the replace method and pass in space (' ') & hyphen (-) as parameters. it will replace each space in the string with a hyphen as you expect.

string test = 'this is a space';
string newtest = test.replace(' ','-');
system.debug(newtest);

quick try in dev console anonymous window with debug log

Answer 3

If you want to remove white space you can use this

string test = 'this is a space';
string newtest = test.replaceAll('\\s+','-');
system.debug(newtest);

Otherwise you wont have to use a regular expression. Use simply use this code:

string test = 'this is a space';
string newtest = test.replace(' ','-');
system.debug(newtest);