How to ignore whitespace in a regular expression subject string?

regex whitespace
Steven picture Steven · Jan 4, 2011 · Viewed 228.6k times · Source

Is there a simple way to ignore the white space in a target string when searching for matches using a regular expression pattern? For example, if my search is for "cats", I would want "c ats" or "ca ts" to match. I can't strip out the whitespace beforehand because I need to find the begin and end index of the match (including any whitespace) in order to highlight that match and any whitespace needs to be there for formatting purposes.

Answer

Sam Dufel picture Sam Dufel · Jan 4, 2011

You can stick optional whitespace characters \s* in between every other character in your regex. Although granted, it will get a bit lengthy.

/cats/ -> /c\s*a\s*t\s*s/

Related questions

Split string on whitespace in Python

I'm looking for the Python equivalent of String str = "many fancy word \nhello \thi"; String whiteSpaceRegex = "\\s"; String[] words = str.split(whiteSpaceRegex); ["many", "fancy", "word", "hello", "hi"]

Read More
Whitespace Matching Regex - Java

The Java API for regular expressions states that \s will match whitespace. So the regex \\s\\s should match two spaces. Pattern whitespace = Pattern.compile("\\s\\s"); matcher = whitespace.matcher(modLine); while (matcher.find()) matcher.replaceAll(" "); The aim of this …

Read More
Remove multiple whitespaces

I'm getting $row['message'] from a MySQL database and I need to remove all whitespace like \n \t and so on. $row['message'] = "This is a Text \n and so on \t Text text."; should be formatted to: $row['message'] = …

Read More