CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
Diego Vieira
Diego Vieira

Reputation: 1150

Regex add space after colon

I'm trying to add a space between the colon and the character or number if there is no space already:

this is my sentence:hi it's midnight
this is my sentence:2012 was a good year.
this sentence should be ignored: ignore me

And I want it to read:

this is my sentence: hi it's midnight
this is my sentence: 2012 was a good year.
this sentence should be ignored: ignore me

I've tried this with no success. Regex to insert space in vim

I can get the ":X" or ":0" using this (it doesn't match the space after the colon, which is good):

:[^\s]

But if I replace with:

: $0

It ends up like:

this is my sentence: :hi it's midnight
this is my sentence: :2012 was a good year.

I'm using http://www.gskinner.com/RegExr/ to test the pattern.

I'll be using PHP preg_replace function

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3651

Answers (2)

RAM
RAM

Reputation: 2419

Here are two substitution commands to be issued in VIM:

 %s/:/:<space>/g

 %s/:<space><space>/:<space>/g

Of course, it is an overkill, that is, the number of commands to be issued is two, not one.

Here is two-in-one command:

:%s/:<space>*/:<space>/g

<space> is used to make it more clear as the whitespace inserted by pressing the spacebar is not printable.

Another approach to work around non-printability of space for searching:

:%s/:\s*/:<space>/g

Upvotes: 1

Blender
Blender

Reputation: 298206

You can just replace :\s* with :<pretend this is a space>:

preg_replace('/:\s*/', ': ', $text)

:\s* matches : followed by any number of spaces (or no spaces).

Upvotes: 6

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