use of regular expressions in string.replaceAll

I have a String in which I'm trying to replace all individual characters (except for spaces) surrounded by spaces with hyphens.
I thought the code to do this would look something like this:

Code :

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str = str.replaceAll(" ^\\s ", " - ");

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However, this doesn't work, so if someone has a solution, it'd be much appreciated.

Try using negation of a character class...' [^\\s] '

Could you please provide the exact line of code you are thinking? I don't know if those single quotes are to be in the code, or where I'm supposed to use them. Thanks.

I was single quoting the regular expression :

Code :

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str = str.replaceAll(" [^\\s] ", " - ");

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