Replacing a new java line

Question

I am wondering why I am not getting the expected result with this:

String t = "1302248663033 <script language='javascript'>nvieor\ngnroeignrieogi</script>"; t.replaceAll("\n", ""); System.out.println(t); 

Output:

 1302248663033 <script language='javascript'>nvieor gnroeignrieogi</script> 

So I wonder why \n still exists. Somebody knows? Is \ n special?

EDIT:

I'm having trouble matching a newline with. in a regex expression, not understanding what to use the DOTALL function, so I'll add what needs to be done here for future reference:

 String text = null; text = FileUtils.readFileToString(inFile); Pattern p = Pattern.compile("<script language='javascript'>.+?</script>\n", Pattern.DOTALL); text = p.matcher(text).replaceAll(""); out.write(text); 

Answer 1

Lines are immutable. String operations, such as replaceAll , do not change the instance with which you call it, return new instances of String. The solution is to assign the modified row to the source variable.

 t = t.replaceAll("\n", ""); 

Answer 2

Yes, \n is special. This is an escape sequence that denotes a new line. You need to avoid this in a string literal so that it is actually interpreted the way you want. Add \ in front of the sequence so that it looks like this:

 "\\n" 

Your program should now look like this:

 String t = "1302248663033 <script language='javascript'>nvieor\\ngnroeignrieogi</script>"; t = t.replaceAll("\\n", ""); System.out.println(t); 

Of course, if the string t comes from somewhere, and is not typed by you into the program, you need to add an additional slash to your replaceAll() call

Edited in accordance with the comments.