Reading regular expressions

James889

Howdy,

I came across a regular expression i couldn't get my head around.

returns howdy.

It's the subgroup that's a bit confusing.

match any sentence which contains banana then a space and then a non-space character.

Is this the correct way of interpreting this regular expression ?

gsal

So, basically, it matches "there " (the word 'there' followed with a blank space) followed with as many consecutive non-blank spaces as it can find "[^ ]*" and replaces that with nothing.

You can test that only replaces what I said, if you test it with "Howdy there neighbor what up?"

Oh, the back slashes are there to escape the parenthesis within the double quotes

James889

Is this the same as saying 'match as much as possible up until a white space is found' ?

Ibix

"White space" would normally include tab characters. This will eat everything up until the first space character; that detail aside, yes.

gsal

Sorry, I guess I need to be more correct, like Ibix says.

The expression "[^ ]*" will consume consecutive character after character until it finds a "blank space" character.

A "blank space" character itself is not the same as "white space" in general...it is a subset. If the regular expression is looking for "white space" then, "blank space" and "tab" characters qualify....but if you are looking for "blank space", then a "tab" is a totally different character.