java - Replace all special character except one

Question

string = str.replaceAll("\W", " ")

This replace all special character by " " (space).

But I try to exclude dash "-" as special character.

This my try:

string = str.replaceAll("\W[^-]", " ")

But this not that I expect.

Q: how do I make this work?

Answer 1

If you want to match all the characters except w and - you can use:

[^w-]

For example:

str.replaceAll("[^\w-]+", " ")