ChatGPT解决这个技术问题 Extra ChatGPT

How to search for occurrences of more than one space between words in a line

How to search for occurrences of more than one space between words in a line

1. this is a line containing  2 spaces
2. this is a line containing   3 spaces
3. this is a line containing multiple spaces first  second   three   four

All the above are valid matches for this regex. What regex should I use?

Are you trying to check consecutive blank spaces or all spaces in that line?
consecutive blank spaces not all spaces
What exactly do you mean by "between words"? In two of your examples, there are multiple spaces between a word and a digit. What about punctuation (for example, do you want to match multiple spaces after a dot and before the next word)? What about spaces before/after the last character in a line? Do you want to match tabs, too? What about lines that consist of nothing but whitespace?
spaces between "containing and 2", "containing and 3", "first and second", "second and three" ... Yes, I want to match spaces after a dot and before the next word.

A
Alex
[ ]{2,}

SPACE (2 or more)

You could also check that before and after those spaces words follow. (not other whitespace like tabs or new lines)

\w[ ]{2,}\w

the same, but you can also pick (capture) only the spaces for tasks like replacement

\w([ ]{2,})\w

or see that before and after spaces there is anything, not only word characters (except whitespace)

[^\s]([ ]{2,})[^\s]

\w means 'word characters', that is, alphanumeric and underscore, but not other non-space characters. To check for non-whitespace, use \S (capital S). Also, the first one will only match lines that contain two or more spaces and nothing else.
I tried to evolve the question. I understood that I missed what you said with \S, I just prefer not to rely on character case for such functionality, it's easier to read.
Why are you using anchors at all? He's looking for spaces embedded somewhere in the lines.
\w[ ]{2,}\w will fail to match word.<2 spaces>more words or a string that consists entirely of spaces. [^\s]([ ]{2,})[^\s]\w will fail on lines that start with spaces or strings like bla<2 spaces>....
Explanations: 1) The {min,max} operator is the general repetition quantifier and 2) Omitting max but leaving the comma means unlimited repetitions.
t
tdammers

Simple solution:

/\s{2,}/

This matches all occurrences of one or more whitespace characters. If you need to match the entire line, but only if it contains two or more consecutive whitespace characters:

/^.*\s{2,}.*$/

If the whitespaces don't need to be consecutive:

/^(.*\s.*){2,}$/

the .* is usually greedy, meaning that it will reach the end of the tested string, and all which follows, if there are mandatory characters, won't match. Usually in this case it's a good practice to add ? , like this .*?. It happened to me using PHP's PCRE
It does match. "Greedy" means that it matches as much as possible while still matching the pattern as a whole. /^.*b.*$/ does in fact match "foobar", even though you'd expect the first greedy .* to match the entire string already.
O
Owen Yuwono

This regex selects all spaces, you can use this and replace it with a single space

\s+

example in python

result = re.sub('\s+',' ', data))

Why is an answer to the question? This wouldn't work if, for instance, one wants to only replace the multiple spaces (with a tab) or any other operation that matches multiple spaces only (as per original question).
This will select everything, not spaces only
T
Tim Pietzcker

Search for [ ]{2,}. This will find two or more adjacent spaces anywhere within the line. It will also match leading and trailing spaces as well as lines that consist entirely of spaces. If you don't want that, check out Alexander's answer.

Actually, you can leave out the brackets, they are just for clarity (otherwise the space character that is being repeated isn't that well visible :)).

The problem with \s{2,} is that it will also match newlines on Windows files (where newlines are denoted by CRLF or \r\n which is matched by \s{2}.

If you also want to find multiple tabs and spaces, use [ \t]{2,}.


more than one space between words in a line. How is [ ]{2,} between words? Have you even read the question?
Which is why I have referred to your answer in case the OP really wants to be as strict as he is writing. Maybe we should ask him.
O
Ojitha

Here is my solution

[^0-9A-Z,\n]

This will remove all the digits, commas and new lines but select the middle space such as data set of

20171106,16632 ESCG0000018SB

20171107,280 ESCG0000018SB

20171106,70476 ESCG0000018SB