What is the Regular Expression For "Not Whitespace and Not a hyphen"

Question

I tried this but it doesn't work :

[^\s-]

Any Ideas?

@Marcelo The regex posted **works fine**. That was why I was asking. The only assumption I can make is that @rudimenter was expecting the class to repeat by default. — Yacoby, May 07 '10 at 11:27
Hi rudimenter, can you please edit your question to clarify what you were actually asking? — Antonio, Feb 17 '16 at 14:37

codaddict · Accepted Answer · 2010-05-07T13:11:21.543

134

[^\s-]

should work and so will

[^-\s]

[] : The char class
^ : Inside the char class ^ is the negator when it appears in the beginning.
\s : short for a white space
- : a literal hyphen. A hyphen is a meta char inside a char class but not when it appears in the beginning or at the end.

edited May 07 '10 at 13:11

answered May 07 '10 at 11:27

codaddict

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-(hyphen) should be escaped right ,since it is used for range. eg:- [a-zA-Z] – Aashiq Dec 07 '20 at 08:07
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@Aashiqahmed not when it appears in the beginning or at the end – freedomn-m Feb 02 '21 at 11:18

score 79 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 03 '13 at 23:16

79

It can be done much easier:

\S which equals [^ \t\r\n\v\f]

answered Jan 03 '13 at 23:16

Engvard

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score 9 · Answer 3 · answered May 07 '10 at 11:30

9

Which programming language are you using? May be you just need to escape the backslash like "[^\\s-]"

answered May 07 '10 at 11:30

Cagdas

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\s stands for whitespace if you backslash the backslash it has an completly different meaning – rudimenter May 07 '10 at 11:33
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@rudimenter: Cagdas was just suggesting that there might be different behavior depending on your environment (which you didn't tell us). – Dirk Vollmar May 07 '10 at 11:40
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@rudimenter: If the regex is defined by a string, then you need to escape the backslash or use a verbatim string like `@"string"` in .NET or `r"string"` in Python. – Tim Pietzcker May 07 '10 at 11:44

score 7 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

7

In Java:

    String regex = "[^-\\s]";

    System.out.println("-".matches(regex)); // prints "false"
    System.out.println(" ".matches(regex)); // prints "false"
    System.out.println("+".matches(regex)); // prints "true"

The regex [^-\s] works as expected. [^\s-] also works.

What is the Regular Expression For "Not Whitespace and Not a hyphen"

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