CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaregex
Romi
Romi

Reputation: 4921

Check string contains whitespace along with some other char sequence using regex in java

am using regex expression to check if a string contains white space. my regex is : ^\\s+$

for example if my string is my name then regex matches should return true. but it is returning true only if my string contains only spaces no other character.

How to check if a string contains a whitespace or tab or carriage return characters in between/start/end of some string.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 32635

Answers (3)

AlexS
AlexS

Reputation: 5345

Your regex is not correct.

  1. That's a string representing a regular expression. (as tchrist pointed out correctly)

  2. The corresponding pattern that you get when using Pattern.compile() matches only strings containing one or more whitespace characters, starting from the beginning until the end. Thus, the matching string only consists of whitespace characters.

Try this string instead for Pattern.compile():

"\\s+"

The difference is that without the anchors "^" and "$" there may be other characters around the whitespace character. The whitespace character(s) may be everywhere in the string.

Using this pattern-string the whitespace character(s) must be at the beginning:

"^\\s+"

And here the sequence of whitespace characters has to be at the end:

"\\s+$"

Upvotes: 4

Dervall
Dervall

Reputation: 5744

^(.*\s+.*)+$ seems to work for me. Accepts anything as long as there is at least one space in the string. This will match the entire string.

If you only want to check for the presence of a space, you can just use \s without any begin or end markers in the string. The difference is that this will only match the individual spaces.

Upvotes: 8

Alexey Berezkin
Alexey Berezkin

Reputation: 1543

Use org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils.containsAny(). See http://commons.apache.org/lang/api-3.1/org/apache/commons/lang3/StringUtils.html.

Upvotes: 0

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