How to ignore whitespace in a regular expression subject string?

Question

Is there a simple way to ignore the white space in a target string when searching for matches using a regular expression pattern? For example, if my search is for \"cats\",

Answer 1

You could put \s* inbetween every character in your search string so if you were looking for cat you would use c\s*a\s*t\s*s\s*s

It's long but you could build the string dynamically of course.

You can see it working here: http://www.rubular.com/r/zzWwvppSpE