[regex] How do I remove trailing whitespace using a regular expression?

I want to remove trailing white spaces and tabs from my code without removing empty lines.

I tried:

\s+$

and:

([^\n]*)\s+\r\n

But they all removed empty lines too. I guess \s matches end-of-line characters too.

UPDATE (2016):

Nowadays I automate such code cleaning by using Sublime's TrailingSpaces package, with custom/user setting:

"trailing_spaces_trim_on_save": true

It highlights trailing white spaces and automatically trims them on save.

To remove trailing white space while ignoring empty lines I use positive look-behind:

(?<=\S)\s+$

The look-behind is the way go to exclude the non-whitespace (\S) from the match.

If using Visual Studio 2012 and later (which uses .NET regular expressions), you can remove trailing whitespace without removing blank lines by using the following regex

Replace (?([^\r\n])\s)+(\r?\n)

With $1

Some explanation

The reason you need the rather complicated expression is that the character class \s matches spaces, tabs and newline characters, so \s+ will match a group of lines containing only whitespace. It doesn't help adding a $ termination to this regex, because this will still match a group of lines containing only whitespace and newline characters.

You may also want to know (as I did) exactly what the (?([^\r\n])\s) expression means. This is an Alternation Construct, which effectively means match to the whitespace character class if it is not a carriage return or linefeed.

Alternation constructs normally have a true and false part,

(?( expression ) yes | no )

but in this case the false part is not specified.

You can simply use it like this:

var regex = /( )/g;

Sample: click here

The platform is not specified, but in C# (.NET) it would be:

Regular expression (presumes the multiline option - the example below uses it):

    [ \t]+(\r?$)

Replacement:

    $1

For an explanation of "\r?$", see Regular Expression Options, Multiline Mode (MSDN).

Code example

This will remove all trailing spaces and all trailing TABs in all lines:

string inputText = "     Hello, World!  \r\n" +
                   "  Some other line\r\n" +
                   "     The last line  ";
string cleanedUpText = Regex.Replace(inputText,
                                     @"[ \t]+(\r?$)", @"$1",
                                     RegexOptions.Multiline);

Regex to find trailing and leading whitespaces:

^[ \t]+|[ \t]+$

To remove trailing whitespace while also preserving whitespace-only lines, you want the regex to only remove trailing whitespace after non-whitespace characters. So you need to first check for a non-whitespace character. This means that the non-whitespace character will be included in the match, so you need to include it in the replacement.

Regex: ([^ \t\r\n])[ \t]+$

Replacement: \1 or $1, depending on the IDE

To remove any blank trailing spaces use this:

\n|^\s+\n

I tested in the Atom and Xcode editors.

[ |\t]+$ with an empty replace works. \s+($) with a $1 replace also works. At least in Visual Studio Code...

In Java:

String str = "    hello world  ";

// prints "hello world" 
System.out.println(str.replaceAll("^(\\s+)|(\\s+)$", ""));