Regex replace 2 or more dashes with one dash

Question

I have used many Regex to do this, but the problem is i want to consider also:

abc- -abc   //should output abc-abc
abc -- abc  //should output abc - abc
abc- - abc  //should output abc- abc
abc - -abc  //should output abc -abc

I have used:

String x=x.replaceAll("[\\-*]{2,}","-");

Answer 1

You can use the following regular expression:

-(\\s*-)+

• -: matches - literally.
• (...)+: grouping (1+ times)
• \\s*-: matches - optionally space (\s) prepended

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x = x.replaceAll("-(\\s*-)+", "-");