Add spacebar in regular expression

Question

I use this regular expression for checking

public const string FullNameRegularExpression = @"^[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+$";

How to add "spacebar" in?

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

4

If you are looking for one single space it is: (" "), a very complete example can be found in this reference.

Or if you want to match any whitespace character (\n,\r,\f,\t, ), you can use \s.

edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

Community

answered Oct 07 '13 at 08:49

Theolodis

you should make op aware of what `\s` would actually match as compared to literal space – Anirudha Oct 07 '13 at 09:18

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 07 '13 at 08:47

0

Notice an added \s

public const string FullNameRegularExpression = @"^[a-zA-Z0-9._-\s]+$";

answered Oct 07 '13 at 08:47

Smile

that would also match \n,\r,\f,\t..OP needs to match only space!.. – Anirudha Oct 07 '13 at 08:50
1

@Anirudh: That is not an issue here as you'll not have tab or newline etc in a filename anyways ;-) – Artur Oct 07 '13 at 08:51
@Artur Then why use a selector that matches them? – JJJ Oct 07 '13 at 08:54
@Juhana: why use a dot in a regex to match anything then? ;-) – Artur Oct 07 '13 at 08:56
@Artur: You got that wrong with the dot. See my comment to your answer. – Daniel Hilgarth Oct 07 '13 at 09:00
@Artur That's really not the same thing, is it? If you have a filename that's *guaranteed* to not contain any other whitespace than space, there's no reason to use any other selector than the space character. But there are valid reasons to use `.` to match everything instead of typing out each possibility (which would be somewhere around a hundred in case of ASCII filenames, not to mention Unicode strings). – JJJ Oct 07 '13 at 09:02
People, please realize: The dot *inside a character expression* does **not** match everything. It matches a dot. Nothing more. – Daniel Hilgarth Oct 07 '13 at 09:04
@DanielHilgarth I thought we were talking about a general case, not this regex specifically. – JJJ Oct 07 '13 at 09:05

Artur · Answer 3 · 2013-10-07T09:28:31.503

-1

You may push a spacebar on your keyboard or add \s or \s+ or \s* to your regex ;-)

edited Oct 07 '13 at 09:28

answered Oct 07 '13 at 08:47

Artur

that would also match \n,\r,\f,\t..OP needs to match only space!.. – Anirudha Oct 07 '13 at 08:50
2

@Anirudh Not if you push spacebar.... – Jerry Oct 07 '13 at 08:51
3

*"To match a dot use \."* Inside a character expression you don't need to escape the dot. – Daniel Hilgarth Oct 07 '13 at 08:58
@Daniel: Indeed and there dot means literal dot. Thanks Daniel – Artur Oct 07 '13 at 09:07

3 Answers3