How to remove all white spaces in java [duplicate]

I have a programming assignment and part of it requires me to make code that reads a line from the user and removes all the white space within that line. the line can consist of one word or more.

What I was trying to do with this program is have it analyze each character until it finds a space and then save that substring as the first token. then loop again until it reaches no more tokens or the end of the line.

I keep on getting this when I try to compile it:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String index   out of range: 1
    at java.lang.String.charAt(String.java:694)
    at trim.main(trim.java:23)

Here is the code

import java.util.Scanner ;
import java.lang.Character;
import java.lang.String ;
public class trim
{
        public static void main (String[]args)
        {

        String a  ;
        String b  ;
        String c ;
        char aChar ;
        int i = 0 ;

        Scanner scan = new Scanner(System.in);

        a = scan.nextLine();
        a =a.trim() ;


         for ( ; i >= 0 ; i++ )
         {
           aChar = a.charAt(i) ;
           if (aChar != 32)
           {
            a = a.substring(0,i+1);
           }
           else
           {
            b = a.substring(i,160) ;
            b= b.trim();
            c = c + a ;
            c = c.trim() ;
            a = b ;
            i = 0 ;
           }
           if (b.equals(null))
           {
            i = -1 ;
           }
         }
        }
}

easier ways to do this is appreciated, but I still want to get this program working.

and I can't use sentinels in the input.

Thanks everybody for all the help,

I will use the simpler method , and will read the javadoc.

Solution 1:

java.lang.String class has method substring not substr , thats the error in your program.

Moreover you can do this in one single line if you are ok in using regular expression.

a.replaceAll("\\s+","");

Solution 2:

Why not use a regex for this?

a = a.replaceAll("\\s","");

In the context of a regex, \s will remove anything that is a space character (including space, tab characters etc). You need to escape the backslash in Java so the regex turns into \\s. Also, since Strings are immutable it is important that you assign the return value of the regex to a.

Solution 3:

The most intuitive way of doing this without using literals or regular expressions:

yourString.replaceAll(" ","");

Solution 4:

Replace all the spaces in the String with empty character.

String lineWithoutSpaces = line.replaceAll("\\s+","");