1. Overview
In this tutorial, we’ll see how we can remove all whitespaces from a Scala String.
2. Remove All Whitespace From a String
Here’s the String we’ll be working with:
scala> val str = " A String with empty spaces "
str: String = " A String with empty spaces "
As we can see, there are whitespaces at the beginning, the end, and the middle of the String as well.
We expect the result to be “AStringwithemptyspaces” after removing all the whitespaces.
There are multiple ways to remove the existing whitespaces. Let’s go through two of them.
2.1. Using the filter() Method
The first solution we’ll look at is a naive approach. Given a String, we can manually exclude the whitespaces characters:
scala> str.filterNot(_.isWhitespace)
res0: String = AStringwithemptyspaces
This approach keeps the original String unmodified, returning a new one.
We should note that we make use of the Char.isWhitespace() method, which is a very useful method for our use case.
2.2. Using the replaceAll() Method
While the previous approach worked fine, it’s not straightforward. Instead, we can use the String.replaceAll() method:
scala> str.replaceAll(" ", "")
res1: String = AStringwithemptyspaces
This approach remove all the empty spaces. Just like the previous approach, the original String is kept unmodified.
3. Conclusion
In this article, we saw how to remove all the whitespace from a Scala String.