Glitch in Regular Expression action by making the Replacement text field mandatory?

[woutert]

The country name 'United Kingdom' becomes #UnitedKingdom  in all our articles and messages. Hashtags like this are used a lot. To create these we need to eliminate spaces from the country name. In NW Online I used to do this with a regex action and replace the pattern \s (space) with nothing (empty replacement text). 

In NWC the Replacement text field is now suddenly mandatory. 

Is this a glitch or does anyone know another easy way to achieve the same result?

[leighburke · Accepted solution]

@woutert Create a variable and use that as the replacement text. As long as you don't set a value it should act as a blank.

[woutert]

Duh... I should have thought about that myself . A trick we unfortunately frequently have to use.

But anyhow: it works for now. Thanks @leighburke .

So for anyone who wants to eliminate spaces from a string, use the regular expression action like this: