Removing all in a token in Gatling/Scala

Question

I have a http response and I save a token using regex and check.

However the token contains a lot of html br (breaks) 's and I want to strip them and merge the token to be one string.

I found this replace function for removing br's:

val str = "{$token}"
    str.replace("<br/>", "")

But how do I implement that in Gatling script? as .exec? or could I just say:

val str = "{$token}"
    str.replace("<br/>", "")

and then:

.exec(http("request_1")
    .post("/SS/?a=internett")
    .header("header_name", "${str}")
    .body(ElFileBody("request.xml"))
    .basicAuth("${y}","y"))