When working with regular expressions, we will encounter spaces and line breaks as they normally are part of almost any text.
So we will need to learn how to manage and deal with them 👇.
Spaces
Spaces are whitespace characters that we use to separate words and other elements in text.
There are several types of spaces in a text, such as:
- Single space:
- Tab:
\t - End of line space:
\r(carriage return) and\n(new line)
To match a whitespace, we can use the metacharacter \s, which includes spaces, tabs, and line breaks.
If we want to find all occurrences of a word that is preceded or followed by one or more spaces, we can use the following pattern:
\spalabra\sThis pattern will match any occurrence of the word "palabra" that is surrounded by spaces.
here space palabra and more spaces
without space beforepalabra and palabradetras
Other symbols related to spaces:
| Symbol | Matches |
|---|---|
\s | Any whitespace (space, tab, line break) |
\S | Any character that is not a whitespace |
\t | A tab character (tab) |
Line Breaks
Line breaks are characters that indicate the end of a line of text. Depending on the operating system, line breaks can be represented in different ways:
- Unix/Linux:
\n - Windows:
\r\n - Mac (old):
\r
To match line breaks, we use \n or \r\n, depending on the operating system.
If we want to match lines that contain a specific word, we can use a pattern like the following:
palabra\nLet’s try it,
another word without line break
Other symbols related to line breaks:
| Symbol | Matches |
|---|---|
\n | A line break |
\r | A carriage return |
\v | A vertical line break |
\f | A form feed |
Combining Spaces and Line Breaks
We can combine spaces and line breaks to create more complex patterns.
For example, if we want to find lines that contain a specific word, and that may be surrounded by whitespace or line breaks, we can use:
\s*palabra\s*This pattern will match the word "palabra" even if there are spaces before or after.