How to remove all special Characters from a string except - . and space

Nirpeksh :

I have a string where I want to remove all special characters except hyphen , a dot and space.

I am using filename.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z0-9.-]",""). It is working for . and - but not for space.

What should I add to this to make it work for space as well?

Karol Dowbecki :

Use either \s or simply a space character as explained in the Pattern class javadoc

\s - A whitespace character: [ \t\n\x0B\f\r]
   - Literal space character

You must either escape - character as \- so it won't be interpreted as range expression or make sure it stays as the last regex character. Putting it all together:

filename.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z0-9\\s.-]", "")
filename.replaceAll("[^a-zA-Z0-9 .-]", "")