What is the Regular Expression For “Not Whitespace and Not a hyphen”

Question

I tried this but it doesn\'t work :

[^\\s-]

Any Ideas?

Answer 1

It can be done much easier:

\S which equals [^ \t\r\n\v\f]

Answer 2

Try [^- ], \s will match 5 other characters beside the space (like tab, newline, formfeed, carriage return).

Answer 3

[^\s-]

should work and so will

[^-\s]

• [] : The char class
• ^ : Inside the char class ^ is the negator when it appears in the beginning.
• \s : short for a white space
• - : a literal hyphen. A hyphen is a meta char inside a char class but not when it appears in the beginning or at the end.

Answer 4

Which programming language are you using? May be you just need to escape the backslash like "[^\\s-]"

Answer 5

In Java:

    String regex = "[^-\\s]";

    System.out.println("-".matches(regex)); // prints "false"
    System.out.println(" ".matches(regex)); // prints "false"
    System.out.println("+".matches(regex)); // prints "true"

The regex [^-\s] works as expected. [^\s-] also works.

See also

• Regular expressions and escaping special characters
• regular-expressions.info/Character class
  • Metacharacters Inside Character Classes

    The hyphen can be included right after the opening bracket, or right before the closing bracket, or right after the negating caret.