How to match any non white space character except a particular one?

Question

In Perl \\S matches any non-whitespace character.

How can I match any non-whitespace character except a backslash \\?

Answer 1

On my system: CentOS 5

I can use \s outside of collections but have to use [:space:] inside of collections. In fact I can use [:space:] only inside collections. So to match a single space using this I have to use [[:space:]] Which is really strange.

echo a b cX | sed -r "s/(a\sb[[:space:]]c[^[:space:]])/Result: \1/"

Result: a b cX

• first space I match with \s
• second space I match alternatively with [[:space:]]
• the X I match with "all but no space" [^[:space:]]

These two will not work:

a[:space:]b  instead use a\sb or a[[:space:]]b

a[^\s]b      instead use a[^[:space:]]b