Java replace special characters in a string

Question

I have a string like this:

BEGIN\n\n\n\nTHIS IS A STRING\n\nEND

And I want to remove all the new line characters and have the result as :

BEGIN THIS IS A STRING END

How do i accomplish this? The standard API functions will not work because of the escape sequence in my experience.

Answer 1

A simple replace('\n', ' ') will cause the string to become:

 BEGIN    THIS IS A STRING  END
      ****                **

where the *'s are spaces. If you want single spaces, try replaceAll("[\r\n]{2,}", " ")

And in case they're no line breaks but literal "\n"'s wither try:

replace("\\n", " ")

or:

replaceAll("(\\\\n){2,}", " ")